Avoid the Summer Slump: 3 Tips from Growth Marketing Experts

What was the last great idea you had for growth? 

No matter how skilled a marketer you are, sometimes we all get into flat-growth slumps. Even a year that started out strong can devolve into a mediocre one, especially during the summer. It can be tough to keep coming up with new ideas that lead to sustained growth over time.

To help you avoid the dreaded summer slump, we asked three growth marketing experts to share their proven tips on how to jump-start growth and keep up momentum through the rest of 2017. Check them all out below, and start incorporating these strategies into your team's growth marketing approach.

3 Growth Tips to Avoid the Summer Slump

1) Seek Out New Voices for Your Content

If you want to grow your content reach, try using Help a Reporter Out to source expert influencers & partners. You can quote them in your piece, and they'll share it to their own audiences.

-- Blaise Lucey, Director of Product & Content Marketing at Bitly

2) Make Your Content Extremely Easy to Share

Create content with sharing in mind, and give your audience a way to easily share it. People share content that they want to represent them, so make sure the piece will make them look smart when they share it. Then, build in sharing mechanisms like social media share links, and mailto links directly into the content.

-- Eric Peters, Growth Marketer at HubSpot Academy

3) Engage With Key Influencers

Be the first to comment on an influencer/journalist's content, and make sure the content adds value to the discussion. That's a better way to start a relationship (and drive more interaction with your own brand) than following them on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.

-- David Ly Khim, Growth Marketing Manager, Sales Products at HubSpot

Get more tips on how to drive sustained growth at in our upcoming live session, 10 Growth Hacks To Help You Crush The Rest of 2017.

http://bit.ly/2vLODAV

How to Ensure Your Facebook Page Complies With Facebook Terms

Do you have a Facebook page for your business? Want to be sure your page isn’t disabled (or worse, shut down) for noncompliance with Facebook’s Terms? In this article, you’ll discover four tips to keep your Facebook page in line with Facebook’s Terms. #1: Name Your Page Accurately Setting up a new Facebook page can [...]

This post How to Ensure Your Facebook Page Complies With Facebook Terms first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

July 27, 2017 at 12:00PM http://bit.ly/2tFAp32
read more...
from http://bit.ly/2tFzbok
via IFTTT

July Social Media News: Snapchat Links, Instagram Photo Replies & More

In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, it's tough -- scratch that -- it's impossible to keep up with every single story that comes out.

And that's especially true of social media, where new features and apps are launched at a speed that leaves social media marketers wondering, "So ... where should I post today?"

That's why we've written this monthly news roundup -- to help you keep up and start testing out new features, new products, and stay up on trends. 

From Facebook to Snapchat, from new product launches to small tweaks, here's a list of what's new in social media this month. The list isn’t exhaustive, but you can expect to learn the major highlights -- what was launched, what changed, and what these stories could mean for marketers.

9 of the Biggest Social Media News Stories This Month

1) Snapchat adds links to posts.

One of Instagram's biggest competitive advantages over Snapchat was the ability to drive traffic: Brands and verified users could add links to Instagram Stories to drive followers to landing pages, blog posts, and purchase pages. This feature made Instagram a more formidable traffic and lead generation tool -- and social media marketers could tie social media efforts directly to traffic generated.

But now, Snapchat offers the same capability -- and it's available to all users, not just a select few.

Users can add links by filming a Snap and tapping the paper clip to add a link, like so:

         

         

(HubSpot customers: We recommend creating a tracking URL when adding links to Instagram and Snapchat Stories so you can calculate direct traffic numbers from the post. Learn how to set one up here.)

2) Snapchat users can add voice filters, change colors, and film multiple Snaps at once.

Another big rollout from Snapchat this month came in the form of expanded filming and editing capabilities.

Now, users can record up to six 10-second Snaps at the same time by holding down the recording button (so as not to interrupt filming) and can quickly and easily post the Snaps all at once. Try this feature out by holding down the record button for as long as you'd like and you'll see the recording turn over after each 10-second video. Then, the snaps you've filmed will show up on the side of your screen that you can pick and choose from when it comes time to post. If you don't like a Snap, you can click and drag it into the trashcan:

Other new features include the Tint Brush, which lets users change the color of elements of a Snap, and backdrops, which let users choose a fun background, and then highlight a part of their Snap they want to be in the foreground. To access these fun editing tools, tap the scissors icon once you've recorded a Snap:

Finally, you can now change the way you sound in Snaps with voice filters, too. Once you record a video, tap the volume icon to choose a squeaky animal voice, a robotic monotone, or an alien accent:

3) Instagram users can now reply to Stories with photos and videos.

In an effort to keep up with Snapchat, on the other hand, Instagram launched the capability to reply to Instagram Stories and direct messages with photos or videos.

This feature has been in place for a while on Snapchat, so it's a smart (and competitive) move to roll out a comparable camera feature. This will allow users to connect with friends and brands in the way they please -- whether that's with text, photos, or videos. Neater still -- users can add a sticker of the story they're replying to in order to make it extra meta:

     

Source: Instagram

4) Facebook is rolling out custom audiences based on interaction with Instagram Business pages.

Facebook has started the rollout of targeting audiences on Facebook based on their prior interactions with Instagram Business profiles. Advertising on Facebook and Instagram was already advantageous, because advertisers could analyze user interactions with different topics and types of content -- but soon, Facebook advertisers will be able to see which business pages specifically convert well. Then, advertisers can target users -- and curate ad content -- accordingly.

Source: Adweek

5) Users can broadcast on Facebook Live in Spaces, Facebook's VR communities.

Remember when we announced the launch of Spaces earlier this year? Facebook launched a new capability with Oculus that lets friends connect 1:1 or in groups of friends -- in full virtual reality (VR).

Depending on your opinion of social media eroding in-person relationships, Spaces is a unique way to connect and engage in a high-tech way. And now, users can broadcast from Facebook Spaces using Facebook Live, so their entire Facebook audiences can see what they're up to.

For brands and individuals who've seen success and engagement using Facebook Live, this could be a cool way to stand out in the busy News Feed. Check it out in action below:

6) Facebook may begin testing a subscription service with publishers this fall.

Source: Facebook

The Street reported this month that Facebook would be launching a subscription service with publishers later this year.

Tests will begin in October, and the service will involve Facebook's Instant Articles -- the already successful and popular publishing platform on the social network. Facebook and publishers will create a paywall after users read 10 articles per month, at which point they'll be directed to a landing page encouraging them to subscribe.

This announcement is part of Facebook's ongoing partnership with publishers as part of the Facebook Journalism Project, a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. This move will be sure to make publishers happy -- especially considering 66% of Facebook users get their news from the site.

7) Twitter users can mute new accounts and people they don't know.

In another step toward improving user safety and preventing harassment, Twitter added a capability that lets users mute newly registered accounts, or accounts that don't follow you. If an abusive user is blocked or suspended from tweeting, they might simply open a new account to continue harassing other Twitter users, and this measure lessens their visibility and prevents targeted users from seeing abusive content.

Now you have even more control over your notifications. Mute accounts that don't follow you, new accounts, and more. http://bit.ly/2eQbWp7 http://pic.twitter.com/RcBQGx219k

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 10, 2017

8) LinkedIn launches native video.

LinkedIn started rolling out a native video feature in a nod to the growing popularity of this content format across platforms. My colleague, Ryan Bonnici, noticed this on his LinkedIn feed recently, and once it rolls out to all users (it's currently being tested among a few users and brands), we'll give you a full rundown of how to use it.

9) Amazon launches Spark, the shoppable social network for Prime users.

In a nod to the popularity of shoppable Instagram posts and lifestyle content on Pinterest, Amazon launched a social sharing platform for Amazon Prime subscribers. It's available within the Amazon mobile app, where users can share visual content and tag different products available for purchase -- where else? -- on Amazon.

Download the Amazon mobile app and check it out:

         

           

Did we miss any news this month? Start a discussion in the comments below.

http://bit.ly/2h5dYCC

How to Decide What to Blog About: 6 Data-Driven Tactics for Choosing Blog Topics

Have you ever written a blog post you were sure was destined to go viral? You spent hours crafting each sentence -- positive that your audience would devour each word, shared it on every possible social platform, and knew it would propel to internet fame in a matter of mere hours.

You even thought about changing your LinkedIn headline to "Marketing Guru" -- because why not? You were about to become one.

Sadly, your digital utopia was just a fantasy. The post -- as some inexplicably tend to do -- tanked. But while you were writing it, you would've bet your life it would break the internet. So what the heck happened?

As marketers, we often succumb to a cognitive bias called the overconfidence effect. Since we're technically experts, we tend to overestimate our industry knowledge and our ability to predict content performance.

This can lead us to rely on our intuition more than data when we brainstorm new blog ideas. Since we like our own ideas, we think our audience will too.

But just because we like our own post, doesn't mean our audience wants to read it.

Instead of relying on our own personal taste, we need to let our audience's behaviors and preferences drive our new blog ideas -- or else we risk publishing irrelevant content.

Analyzing audience data before ideation is crucial for crafting desirable content. Take a look below to learn six data-driven tactics for choosing the topics your audience actually wants to read.

6 Data-driven Tactics for Choosing Blog Topics

1) Find Out What's Already Working for You

The most accessible data source that can inform your blog strategy are your own metrics. You just need to tag each of your blog posts with their respective topic first. By categorizing your blog posts, you can measure each topic's performance with data analysis tools like excel or HubSpot's Content Strategy tool.

The performance metrics you decide to track depend on your marketing goals. At HubSpot, page views largely determine a topic's success, but other metrics like time on page, subscribers gained, or leads generated can also indicate whether a topic resonates with your audience or not. It's crucial to determine a key business objective you want your blog to serve and monitor the metrics that indicate its success.

It's also valuable to take into account how many posts you publish on each topic. You want to make sure you're serving your audience's true interests and not overlooking potentialy fruitful topics.

For instance, let's say HubSpot's blog posts about display advertising and video marketing generate the same amount of total traffic. On the surface, it seems like our audience enjoys these topics equally, right?

But a particular topic's total traffic might not tell the full story. What if we publish display advertising posts three times more often than video marketing posts?

This means publishing 30 display advertising posts produces the same total traffic that 10 video marketing posts produce. In other words, video marketing posts are three times more effective than display advertising posts.

By cutting display advertising out of our content mix and writing more video marketing posts, we'd serve our audience's interests better and generate more traffic with less content.

Here's a concrete example of what I'm talking about:

Old Blog Strategy

New Blog Strategy

When you analyze your blog topics, use the average or median views per post to paint the clearest picture of your audience's preferences. Looking at a topic's total traffic without accounting for post quantity could make you prioritize a topic that your audience doesn't really care about.

2) See What Works For Your Competitors

Odds are, you and your competitors have a very similar audience. This means their most popular content could potentially be your most popular content too.

Consider using a tool like BuzzSumo or EpicBeat to analyze your competitor's most shared topics. Are they writing about something that would interest your own audience?

Once you discover their top performing content, ask yourself how you can improve upon their work. It's fine to cover the same overarching topics as a competitor, but you should offer your own unique perspective and provide new insights to your audience.

3) Read Your Audience's Conversations Online

As a writer who blogs about inbound marketing, I constantly comb through Inbound.org and the Content Marketing Institute LinkedIn group because they're full of fodder for my best blog ideas.

Marketers post questions to these sites every day. And since they publicly display their professional information, you can tie their inquiries to your buyer personas. This helps clarify your personas' needs and makes it easier to personalize content for them.

On Inbound.org, I like to scan the Discussions section where the top marketing questions of the week live. When someone posts a question about a topic we want to cover, I check to see if that person's role aligns with one of our buyer personas. If so, I write down a blog post idea that answers their question and pitch it at our monthly brainstorm.

If you don't blog about marketing, then you can search for your audience's questions on Quora. Just type in your topic and you'll find loads of relevant questions. If an overwhelming pile of questions presents itself, then just check out your topic's top followers and read the questions they've answered about your topic.

Check out the tutorial below if you need more clarification.

4) Leverage Google's People Also Ask Box

If one of your chosen topics resonates particularly well with your audience, and you want to keep leveraging its popularity, Google it to discover related search terms. When you search for a term in Google, you'll see a "People Also Ask" box pop up beneath your entry, like this:

Think of these queries as high-demand topics that branch off of your main topic. If your audience loves consuming content about your main topic, then they'll likely devour content about its related topics.

5) Survey Your Blog Subscribers

Is there a better way to capture your audience's reading preferences than surveying your own audience?

Before you send out your surveys, though, you should know that not all your subscribers will pounce at the chance to provide feedback. But that's where incentives come in. Consider offering respondents the chance to win a prize, like a gift certificate, to encourage feedback.

Every time we incentivize subscribers to complete our blog surveys, we see much more participation than when we don't dangle any carrots.

6) Ask Sales and Success About Your Customers' Pain Points

Sales and customer success help consult your prospects and customers everyday, so they have the firmest grasp of your audience's actual needs and pain points. Collaborating with these teams is the best way to pinpoint your readers' most pressing issues.

To better understand your prospects and customers' struggles, you could set up a monthly meeting with sales and success or ask them to jot down the most common problems and the content recommendations that would likely solve them.

How do you research new blog ideas? Tell us in the comments below!

http://bit.ly/2w07V4W

How to Track Dark Social Traffic in Google Analytics

Are links to your content shared via private messages on social media? Wondering how to identify and measure that traffic? Dark social traffic comes from sources such as Facebook Messenger, Twitter DMs, and even email. Being able to accurately trace this traffic will give you a more complete picture of how your content is performing. [...]

This post How to Track Dark Social Traffic in Google Analytics first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

July 26, 2017 at 12:00PM http://bit.ly/2v7111j
read more...
from http://bit.ly/2v7qxDs
via IFTTT

AI in Marketing: 10 Early Use Cases

Just a short while ago, robots were the stuff of fiction.

Sure, artificially intelligent beings graced movie screens and the pages of novels, but the robot revolution hadn't arrived yet. Maybe in another few decades, along with flying cars.

But the truth is, artificial intelligence is already here, and you probably engage with it more than you think.

As it turns out, you're not alone. We surveyed more than 1,000 consumers and determined that 63% of respondents were already using AI technologies -- they just didn't realize it.

And that's because AI technologies are being developed, in part, to help make humans' lives easier by independently -- and intelligently -- completing tasks for them.

AI is already in use in a myriad of marketing use cases. From content curation, to SEO, to email marketing, different tools are already being used by brands -- not only to make human marketers' lives easier, but to make them better at their jobs. When processes are optimized and made faster by technology, not only can businesses achieve better outcomes, but humans also have more time freed up for critical thinking, data analysis, and long-term planning when they aren't bogged down with more rote tasks.

Here's a rundown of how forward-thinking brands are already using AI in marketing.

10 Marketing Use Cases for AI

1) Website Design

AI can assist marketers in a variety of use cases -- even from the very beginning of the marketing process -- including the building of the website.

The Grid uses AI named Molly to design websites, and a few creators are already using platforms "she" has built.

The Grid's value proposition? Molly can build websites at a fraction of the time -- and cost -- it would require hiring a team of developers and software engineers to complete the same task. The Grid starts at less than $100 per year for one website -- a bargain compared to a salary.

Creators can input content into The Grid -- like images, text, and calls-to-action -- and Molly builds the site using the power of AI. Check out the demonstration below:

2) Content Creation

Content writers might think jobs are safe from being replaced by AI, and for now, that's mostly true. But tools like Wordsmith and Quill are already being used by the likes of The Associated Press and Forbes to create clickable news content. Using templates and fill-in-the-blanks to enter relevant data and keywords, these tools can generate unique written content that actually reads like it was written by a human. (Maybe not a Pulitzer Prize-winning human, but the sentences and stories make sense.)

Here's an example from The Associated Press:

Then, marketers can edit AI-generated content using Hemingway App, a simple AI that makes prose bolder, clearer, and more concise by highlighting complex sentences and suggesting different word choices, as shown below:

3) Content Curation

There's nothing worse than the moment when you finish an amazing new series on Netflix. But luckily, you can usually start binge-watching another show right away -- thanks to the power of AI.

Brands like Netflix and Amazon are already using AI to curate recommendations to keep customers engaged and consuming and continuing to subscribe. Using AIs like IBM Watson, brands can learn more and more about consumers by analyzing their behavior -- and providing curated content and recommendations for them.

Under Armour uses data from Watson to customize emails it sends to its app users, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art uses an "artbot" that answers requests to see specific types of art with curated photographs and paintings. I tried out the artbot below -- send it a request at 572-51:

4) Search

AI has already had a tremendous impact on the way users conduct online searches, and, in turn, that's changing the way marketers create and optimize content.

Two big AI advances have changed online searches -- and search engine optimization: voice search, and Google's RankBrain.

Innovations like the Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana make it easier for people to conduct searches with just the press of a button and voice command. That means the terms they're searching for are changing, too -- now, instead of typing in "restaurants in Boston," users can ask a device, "where should I go to dinner tonight?" 

RankBrain is Google's machine-learning algorithm that was created to deliver more relevant search results. It interprets queries and, using the power of AI, serves up the best possible results according to what it interprets from the language. For example, if you searched for "president" on Google in the United States, RankBrain might interpret that you wanted information about the current president and would serve you information about the individual -- and not just the office of government. 

Conversational search queries and algorithms are changing thanks to AI -- and, in turn, these changes are forcing search engine marketers and content creators to adapt. Long-tail keywords have been replaced by conversational keywords, and writing blog post after blog post about every topic imaginable has been replaced by the topic cluster keyword strategy, as outlined in the video below. In fact, we're adapting our blogging strategy to this new model here at HubSpot -- and that's partly because of AI.

5) Marketing Automation

Brands are using the power of AI to customize marketing emails based on customer preferences and behavior to engage them more and -- hopefully -- prompt them to convert or make a purchase. 

Using tools like Boomtrain, brands can send out customized email newsletters based on previous interactions recipients have had with content. AI helps send customized, personalized content recipients might be more likely to interact with -- and click through.

Online lingerie brand Adore Me used Optimove's AI to segment its customer list into different types of prospects and customers to increase purchases and subscribers to its membership pricing program. The AI automated the segmentation process and started sending customized content based on each recipient's lifecycle stage via email, text messages, and in-app notifications. Segmenting customers and contacting them on different platforms helped Adore Me increase its monthly recurring revenue (MRR), average sales price (ASP), along with doubling its active customer base.

When it comes to marketing automation, AI can free up valuable human marketers' time -- and quickly create more targeted marketing materials that convert better among customers.

6) Social Media

What's wonderful about social media is its ability to connect people from around the world to talk about and share topics or stories they care about. It's something users have clearly gleaned to -- considering that global social media users number in the billions.

Of course, that also means advertisers want to capitalize on social media's popularity -- and not all advertisers are good advertisers.

So platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have made it easier for social media users to hide ad content they don't like or derive value from -- and this information helps customize the user experience for them while providing advertisers and publishers with more audience insights on the platforms.

Here's an example of an ad I can hide on Facebook -- and I can even choose a reason why I don't want to see it:

 

Platforms use these insights to algorithmically curate a news feed better suited to user preferences, and ad buyers don't have to waste money serving ads users have already indicated they don't like.

Facebook is using AI to mitigate and prevent websites from sharing content that provides a bad user experience. It's training artificial intelligence to identify and recognize patterns in low-quality sites -- things like little original content, clickbait headlines, and multiple disruptive ads. These low-quality links -- and the original domain -- will be penalized in the News Feed and likely result in significant decreases in traffic for the publisher.

7) Images

Do you like playing around with neat filters and facial lenses that turn you into a dog, a bumblebee, or a cat on Snapchat? These augmented reality capabilities are powered by AI image recognition.

Using neural networks to recognize and identify shapes and faces, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram have made it possible for you to barf rainbows, turn into a cute animal, or swap faces with your friend -- to horrifyingly funny results.

Source: BoredPanda

These disappearing messaging platforms are used by millions of people worldwide -- not only for private communication with friends, but also by brands trying to connect with audiences on a more authentic and personal level. Through the power of AI, brands can connect with people in unique and personal ways where audiences are spending time online -- namely, on social media.

8) Advertising

If you've purchased keyword ad space using GoogleAdWords lately, you've already used AI -- in the form of its automated bidding system. Advertisers can automatically bid for the lowest possible cost per click (CPC) to efficiently and effectively capture traffic from Google results.

And now, Adgorithms has AI that they want to take over entire advertising campaigns -- named Albert. Programming advertising will make up the majority of ad buying going forward, but Albert will handle the bidding, integration, management, and execution of ad campaigns across platforms -- from email, to search engines. to social media.

Human marketers and business leaders tell Albert about a campaign's desired outcome, target audience, and geographic area, and "he" handles the rest. And because Albert is AI, he works a lot faster than people, and he can identify different audience niches and buying patterns by analyzing data, too.

Harley-Davidson of NYC started using Albert, and "he" made triple the sales the in-person dealership typically made in a single week. The brand credits Albert for its 40% motorcycle sales growth and 566% growth in website visits.

9) Chatbots

Lots of brands have started communicating with customers using messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack. It's fast, customers are already using these tools to communicate with friends and coworkers, and let's face it -- sometimes, you just don't want to hop on a phone call to get an answer.

And chatbots seek to make that process even easier. GrowthBot seeks to provide answers to commonly-asked questions about marketing and sales professionals -- without them having to hunt down the information themselves. 

Here's how GrowthBot works in action on Slack: Users can ask specific questions about different industries and brands, and the highly technical answers are served up quickly without having to track them down:

Chatbots' wealth of information -- like GrowthBot's -- helps marketers and salespeople quickly find and analyze information about their industries and competitors to get their jobs done more efficiently. Neat, huh?

10) Sales Handoff

And finally, once marketers have successfully created content that's generated leads ready to work with a salesperson, AI can assist with the handoff process.

Conversica created AI named "Angie" to work for CenturyLink, one of the world's largest telecommunications providers. CenturyLink needed help identifying hot leads among the thousands of leads it generates every day from its large presence online and in media. Angie sends initial emails to new leads to determine if they're ready to talk to a human sales representative -- which saves reps time and effort, more efficiently segments leads, and saves CenturyLink money on hiring another human being.

At CenturyLink, Angie can identify 40 hot leads per week, and for every dollar spent on "her," she brings in $20 in revenue. The AI can understand 99% of email replies sent when "she" reaches out to leads -- which saves the company time and helps leads communicate on their desired platform.

What About Me?

At this point, learning about all of the use cases for AI in marketing might be giving you a bit of anxiety about your own job security. If that's the case, you're not alone.

While it's true that part of the appeal of using AI is its low cost and high levels of efficiency, there are only so many things AIs can replicate. In fact, some of the best use cases for AI in this blog post involve AIs and humans working together to solve problems and achieve goals faster and more efficiently. So don't think of AI like a robot trying to steal your job -- think of AI like technology that will make your job easier, much like computers and internet did over the last century.

If anything, the growth of AI in marketing might make you excited about a future where you have more time freed up for higher-level projects, and more rote tasks are taken off your plate. Learn more about how AI is used and the future of artificial intelligence from new HubSpot research.

Which AI technologies will you consider implementing? Share with us in the comments below.

http://bit.ly/2uY9aEe

AI and Big Data Are Changing Our Attention Spans

What catches your attention?

The business of answering that question attracts hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as there have been things to buy, there's been a market for human attention.

Long ago, capitalizing on human attention consisted of little more than the call of a street vendor over the din of a crowded village market.

Much later, the first one cent copies of The Sun hit the streets of New York, inspired by the realization of its editor that it was much more valuable to sell each reader's attention to advertisers than to make money off newspaper sales directly.

Today, that concept has been taken to an extreme. Thousands of algorithms on millions of servers auction off your every click and tap, anticipating which emails you'll open, which search results you'll read, even how your eye might dart around the page.

Google and Facebook rely almost exclusively on directly reselling human attention. Machines are starting to help optimize email subject lines and article titles based on what might catch your eye. The playbook is simple: attract human attention with cheap or free stuff -- cheap newspapers, Google search, interesting reading material -- and optionally resell that attention to the highest bidder.

Where are we headed? In the face of this transformation, what can we expect? Answering these questions is hard. To go any further, it's important to understand how attention works.

How Attention Works

Your attention is like a spotlight cast on a stage. You're the spotlight operator. You can point the spotlight at specific things on stage, but you can't control what actually appears on the stage.

The stage is your awareness, and it contains the sum total of information accessible to your mind at this moment. That includes the words on your screen, the sensation of pressure from your chair, and background noises in your environment, as well as the never-ending stream of random thoughts that pop up in your head.

As you read this, you are volitionally casting your spotlight on the words you're reading. You'll keep this up for a little while, but inevitably, the spotlight will move without your permission, attracted by an unexpected noise behind you, or someone walking into your field of view, or a stray thought about what you want for lunch.

This is the nature of attention. It darts around, scanning continuously for what's interesting. This was an invaluable benefit in our ancestral environment. It was rare we might need to focus on one thing for more than a few moments at a time, but essential not to miss that snarling predator lurking in the bush.

As a result, if you try really hard to pay attention to only one thing, you'll quickly find your attention elsewhere. In fact, usually, your brain decides to change the subject of your attention without your conscious input, much less your permission. You might have already drifted off into a different thought a few times as you read this. Your brain expects a little hit of feel-good neurotransmitter every time your attention jumps to something interesting. Novelty feels good.

This is precisely what makes it hard to reliably capture people's attention. Generally, people themselves don't understand what catches their attention or why. Most shifts in attention are unconscious, so it's impossible for people to articulate why their attention does what it does. They only notice what it does after it has happened. Certain colors of call-to-action buttons work better on a landing page than others not due to any conscious decision by anyone, but due to the unconscious preferences of billions of brains.

Certainly, there are some things that work very well on all of us: bright colors, flashing objects, and attractive scantily clad people are all widely used to great effect. For a new parent, there's nothing better than an iPad to quell a tantrum from a cranky toddler, and that's because looking at colorful moving images feels good.

But beyond the obvious, the target of your attention is largely determined by neural mechanisms cultivated over decades of interacting with the world and anticipating the reward from different stimuli. Your brain is constantly moving about the spotlight of attention on the lookout for potential sources of pleasure and pain.

Attention in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The best approach we've developed for understanding what captures people's attention is empirical. We record as much as we can about what's in their awareness -- or what's on stage. We then try to record where the spotlight is cast  -- by recording a clicked link or opened email. Then, we look for patterns.

Each of those components is going to evolve dramatically over the next few years. The environments where we spend our time increasingly facilitate data collection. Algorithms for working with language, audio, and video are rapidly becoming more sophisticated. Hardware and cloud service improvements are accelerating research and discovery in artificial intelligence. There are several implications:

1) We'll have more data on both attention and awareness.

Eye-tracking has long been used in psychology, marketing, and consumer research, in both academia and business. It works great for studying cognitive development in infants and can even be used to A/B test their preferences.

Shops already use realtime facial expression APIs to track ad viewers' age, gender, mood, and interest level. Google's Project Soli is a miniature solid state radar that can detect the movement of your hand and other objects near your phone. We appear comfortable with inviting Amazon Echo’s Orwellian always-on microphone into our homes.

How long before we see Amazon announce Prime Plus, requesting permission to occasionally activate your front-facing camera, Echo microphone, and motion tracker in exchange for free 30-minute drone delivery?

2) The arms race for attention will expand.

Attention is zero-sum, because every click your competitor gains, you lose. This accelerates competition. That’s why your email inbox is a battleground of people vying for your attention. So is the results page for every Google search. This will be increasingly true of everywhere you spend your attention.

3) Screens will remain the primary conduit of human attention.

Screens are everywhere. Not only did our glossy paranormal hand rectangles become globally ubiquitous in just 10 years, they've fundamentally transformed how humans interact with the world. While technology often advances unpredictably, screens are probably likely to persist for a while. That's because out of the five senses you have -- the five ways of putting information into awareness -- vision has the highest throughput to the brain. We are multiple breakthroughs away from anything faster.

4) Humans will spend huge amounts of time in virtual worlds.

The $100 billion video game industry continues to boom. Games will become dramatically more immersive as virtual and augmented reality go mainstream. People will routinely spend time in deep and engaging virtual environments with limitless content to explore and hundreds of millions of other real and simulated people to interact with. That could transform how we spend our leisure time, how we learn, and how we meet other people.

Content in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Think of “content” as all things that attract human attention that can be represented as data. That includes almost anything online that humans make, from blog posts and dance music to short stories, video game livestreams, entertaining social media posts, and more. The more quality content you can produce, the more attention you can scoop up, continuing to sate our limitless thirst for customization and novelty.

1) Generative algorithms for text, images, sound, and video will improve dramatically.

Machine vision, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing have made tremendous advancements in the past five years. Algorithms can already generate extremely convincing content from scratch.

The next generation of photo and video editing tools will make it trivial to rewrite any record of reality, replacing pixels using algorithms that are aware of what they’re looking at.

Adobe claims to be working on a Photoshop for audio, making it easy to generate an audio clip of anybody’s voice saying anything at all.

Today, you can ask a neural network to hallucinate arbitrarily many images of bedrooms or cats or sailboats, most of which look real enough to fool people. Or you could use a neural network to create a language snippet to insert into an email by reading a company’s website.

Eventually, you might ask a machine to produce a fantasy novel. Say you theme it similar to Harry Potter ... but with a Game of Thrones flair. And let’s maybe have the bad guy win this time.

This is a very a long way off, past multiple breakthroughs in semantics and discourse, but current techniques can already generalize well enough to spit out a cohesive and useful paragraph of text.

2) Machines will help us produce content.

Machines will play a much bigger role in helping us produce the content that captures human attention. We’ll see a proliferation of collaborative agents in products that assist us in our workflows. Machines will suggest assets to include in the content you're making, or subsets of content to include. Executive control will remain with creators, but the ideation and production process will become increasingly automated. Think Clippy the Microsoft Office Assistant, but with a much bigger brain. 

3) To cut through greater noise, humans will keep innovating.

Demonstrating that content was created by a human will become much harder. There's no way you can imagine this article having been written by a machine, but one day, that won't seem so ridiculous.

Machines are cheap, so as machines contribute more to creating content, the places where we consume content will be flooded. Early adopters of those techniques will benefits, but the late adopters will find that to stand out, they’ll have to produce content that is demonstrably beyond machines' capabilities in an effort to keep attracting interest.

4) Machines will help us allocate our attention.

Work will become increasingly symbiotic. You'll spend more of your time deciding among things and less collecting and preparing things. Machines will find relevant documents and emails, do Google searches in the background, and perform other functions that can be defined as a semi-structured set of tasks. As the deluge of content on our screens grows, tools will emerge to stem the flood. 

Broader Implications

Attention is an essential currency in the global transaction ecosystem. Understanding it is critical for anybody in sales and marketing. Despite the fact that attention is zero-sum in any given transaction, it’s important to remember that the pie is growing dramatically.

Leisure time has grown by seven hours per week since the 1960s, and we will unlock much more free time as we shift toward self-driving vehicles. Economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper suggesting that high-quality video games are contributing to an increase in unemployment among young men.

Uber, Upwork, and Crowdflower support the emergence of a global market for part-time, on-demand work at a variety of price points. Y Combinator and Elon Musk are calling for a universal basic income plan.

To connect these dots, it's not hard to imagine a future in which wealthy corporations and governments support a basic minimum wage, and in return, people spend their time and attention generating training data and validating models. It would generally be simple tasks, easily performed on a phone, and would involve only skills or data that machines don’t have yet.

Data on human attention exposes the unconscious information locked away in our minds. That information is valuable and important, because in the aggregate, it is an encoding of everything humans want -- not just of our buying preferences and creature comforts, but also of our ethics and values as a species. We want machines to understand us, and monitoring human attention may be a good way to collect the necessary data.

With the curtain pulled back on how powerless we are to control our attention and how valuable it is to everyone, perhaps we’ll all find ourselves being a bit more careful with how we spend our attention.

 

http://bit.ly/2utveWT