Which types of Artificial Intelligence should we be worried about?

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By Ross Dawson

I don’t tend to be fan of static column infographics, but I make an exception for this lovely infographic from BBC on whether we should be worried about Artificial Intelligence.

It looks at the many imagined and existing instances where AI is having an impact on our lives, including algorithmic trading, killer robots, seductive operating systems, superhuman cyborgs, and self-replicating AI, and then looks at the domains in which machines and humans excel.

Recommended!!

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Source: BBC Future

The C-Suite Finally Embraces Social Media: Here’s What That Looks Like

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It doesn’t seem that long ago that if surveyed, most CEOs would admit to either a lack of use for social media for themselves or a complete abhorrence for it. Times have changed. A recently released study by Weber Shandwick found that 80% of the chief executive officers of the world’s largest 50 companies are now engaged online and on social media. The results published in “Socializing Your CEO: From Marginal to Mainstream,” show that CEO sociability has more than doubled since 2010.

Unsurprisingly, the study found that LinkedIn was the most popular social media network for CEOs, followed by Twitter.


Image Source: Weber Shandwick

According to the Weber Shandwick CEO study, Facebook usage in 2014 was non-existent for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the number of fake CEO accounts on the site. Otherwise, usage on other social networks increased substantially.

As the study learned, CEOs are becoming more comfortable with the idea of some level of social engagement and are more rapidly beginning to understand its value and embrace it. Newer and more established CEOs alike are now realizing that being more socially engaged can help them communicate more quickly and easily when demands on their time prevent them from doing so with more traditional communication channels.

However, as the survey report indicates, there is no one-size fits all approach for CEOs since the types of networks used and what gets posted on them can vary depending on personality and situation.

But C-suite adoption of social media isn’t just confined to CEOs or even CMOs. A different study CIO Social Insights Report (by Robert Half International and Leadtail) indicates the need to broaden that perspective with the inclusion of CIOs. While that study doesn’t delve into specific numbers related how social media use among CIOs has changed, it does provide some insight into how CIOs are using it today.

While the key findings listed below aren’t too surprising, they do indicate that CIOs may be using social media more for conveying and accessing information than for being outright social within their company and with their industry peers:

  • CIOs engage on social media to showcase expertise and leadership, and drive conversations about technology strategy and innovation.
  • Cloud computing and infrastructure, big data, analytics and the Internet of Things are top-of-mind topics for these technology executives.
  • CIOs and IT leaders actively engage with the social media content of other technology leaders, industry analysts and journalists, as well as with marketing and social media influencers.

Like their CEOs, CIOs seem to prefer Twitter to most other social networks. Where this gets interesting, though, is what the study reveals about the publishers CIOs prefer to retweet information from. While the top 20 includes what you might expect — CIO.com (number 1) and CIO Magazine (number 20), in between are sandwiched sites like Mashable, Venture Beat, and The Verge. A bit of an eclectic mix that indicates that this audience isn’t as confined to pure technology plays as one might think.


Image Source: Robert Half

The CIO Insights Report reveals a mix of technology, business and financial outlets as source material for Twitter activity by CIOs.

The list of thought leaders CIOs mentioned for the report or follow is equally varied and includes Vala Afshar (CMO of Extreme Network), Peter Thiel (PayPal founder) and Steve Wozniak. Yes, Steve Wozniak is still relevant with CIOs.

What both of these reports indicate is that the adoption by the C-Suite of social media that employees at every level have been clamoring for is finally starting to happen. Will a couple of high profile slip-ups on social media reverse that trend? More than likely not. As new apps for sharing more visual information over social networks become easier to use and more readily available, there will likely come a day when the C-suite will wonder why they didn’t embrace social media earlier.

Insights into the levers of innovation in 40 major cities globally

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The City Initiatives for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CITIE), a joint venture of NESTA, Catapult, and Accenture, has just release a very interesting report on the drivers of innovation in major cities globally.

The CITIE Framework examines 9 different areas in which cities can support entrepreneurship and innovation, shown here:
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How Brands Are Using Live Video Events: The Opportunity for PR

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New Balance, MasterCraft, Pottery Barn. Three big U.S. brands, one innovation in common: using live video events to improve public relations. The game changing potential of live, interactive broadcasts is already in motion. Take, for instance, the rapid growth of live-streaming platforms such as Ustream, Brandlive, Meerkat and Periscope. How are top brands using these live video technologies successfully, and what role should PR play in this process?

New Balance: Finding the right balance between in-store and online media
Sports footwear giant New Balance uses live video to build multi-event product launches. Consumers and retailers have been invited to “hear about all the latest in #runnovation and get your questions answered by the product team, live from #NBHQ!” Company spokesperson Tom Taylor has praised live video as “a powerful and consistent means of visually connecting with fans and customers, bridging the gap between in-store and online”.

If retail is on track for a high-tech, interactive future, the footwear brand is stepping in the right direction. Video kiosks at the brand’s retailers create in-store hype, while its live webcasts integrate social feeds, chat and e-commerce. New Balance also uses live video internally to give field reps the low-down on its products and brand message.


MasterCraft: Mastering the art of product education
Another brand using live video events for both training and consumer awareness is premium sports boat manufacturer MasterCraft. The company sought a streamlined method to inform its 150 boat dealers about new models. It also desired real-time, visual engagement with its geographically diverse consumers. As MasterCraft’s Director of Marketing, Jason Boertje, told Retail TouchPoints, “The more we can show our product when we educate the consumer, the better off we’ll be.” Using live videos with real-time question and answer feeds has increased the sense of participation from consumers and dealers alike.

Boertje believes that an interaction-based live video model offers a promising return on investment. Digital marketing research by MasterCraft’s live video platform, Brandlive, indicates that consumers are more likely to buy a product featured on a live, interactive broadcast than on a pre-recorded video. Plus MasterCraft can use Brandlive’s post-video quizzes and attendance stats to gauge the learning and loyalty of its dealer network. Creating and archiving live videos about sales, product specs and upkeep is proving convenient for the company and practical for sellers to access.


Pottery Barn: Harvesting the hype around holidays
Home-furnishing store chain Pottery Barn is converting public fanfare around holidays into live video. Online events such as “Host a Spooktacular Halloween Party” and “DIY Easter Baskets” are fun, informative and useful. Quality content adds value for viewers and can improve brand loyalty. Therefore, Pottery Barn crafts the perception of valuable content by asking viewers to register for “exclusive access” and by posting Facebook promos with in-house designers.

Nick Wheatley from VideoCommerce observes that, like Pottery Barn, the majority of brands using live video are not hiring professional talent. Instead, they are putting their own employees in the limelight. This strategy not only reduces costs; it also lets employee devotion and knowledge shine through.


How PR can ramp up its offerings
In a world where companies can deliver PR messages straight to the consumer via live video, how and why should PR firms assist with this process?

Fritz Brumder, CEO and co-founder of Brandlive, puts forward the following case in PR Daily:

“The good news is that PR firms are uniquely qualified to claim ownership of live video, because their media outreach efforts tend to focus more on timely news or event-driven campaigns such as product launches.

A PR agency looking to beef up its live interactive video offerings must know how to successfully build on its traditional skill sets. Based on our experience at Brandlive producing over 3,000 live interactive video events for over 120 brands, PR firms that can pull together a team with the following skills to form a “live streaming video center of excellence” will be best positioned to succeed:

  • Structuring and crafting brand and product stories
  • Preparing client executives for on-camera/on-stage appearances
  • Activating social interaction
  • Knowledge of audio/video production”.

The business case for PR involvement
As Brumder points out, PR agencies must formulate “a business case for why their live video capabilities would provide better value or produce more valuable results” than unassisted live broadcasts by companies.

Martin Shepherdly, the CEO and founder of BeThere Global, comments that live streaming has three advantages over traditional PR mediums:

  1. The level of engagement and two-way communication engendered among the audience through interactivity
  2. The customization of the viewer experience for specific audiences, and
  3. The detail with which viewer statistics can be measured.

PR agencies must learn to harness these benefits for clients if they are to swap pre-prepared, commercialized spin for natural, personal interaction. As futurist Ross Dawson reminds us in an article on where PR is going, PR is no longer “about hiding or manipulating the truth; it is about providing access, being open”. Live video bolsters a massive opportunity for PR: helping brands to engage with a world that favours dialogue and transparency.

Image sources: New Balance, MasterCraft, and Pottery Barn

Five Steps to Being a Highly Visual PR Agency

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A couple of years ago there was quite a flurry of discussion, panel topics and articles bemoaning the state of public relations relative to its entrenched use of words over pictures. The reason for the hand wringing was that most public relations professionals were still focused on the highly non-visual means of communicating through press releases, email pitches and written statements. Who could blame the profession for their concern considering the growing propensity of the world to be far more enamored with pictures and video over text? Meanwhile, ad agencies, design shops and digital production houses were all beating PR to the visual punch.

Unfortunately, the most substantial visual element that PR could lay claim to in this burgeoning visual age is the popularity and use of infographics. While both praised and decried, infographics at least gave PR a means to an end in terms of conveying data rich information in what could be a visual but meaningful way.

But infographics aren’t the same as the pictures and video that is becoming the shared content of choice in social media. Even the most popular text intensive social media platform – Twitter – has added greater ability to share videos and pictures; and one visual oriented social channel after another has entered the market. Even popular video sharing sites like YouTube, Vine and Vimeo are being chased down by the likes of up and comers Meerkat and Periscope (connected to Twitter).

While it can be argued that any self-respecting PR person has known the value of a good visual for some time, product shots or even short explainer videos accompanying a press release don’t really count. This isn’t visual story telling. It’s just attaching a visual to a written document. That’s not the way people want their information, how they consume it or even the most effective way to communicate it.

To provide some idea as to the impact of video from a marketing standpoint, consider these facts about video usage from an article in Business2Community

  • The use of video content for marketing increased 73% this year; use of infographics grew 51%.
  • Articles with images get 94% more views than those without.
  • Posts with videos attract three times as many inbound links as plain text posts.
  • 62% of marketers use video in their content marketing.
  • Two-thirds of firms plan to increase spending on video marketing in the coming year.

The future of communications is clearly established in the visual arts, so how do PR agencies match or even catch up to ad agencies, digital agencies and design firms to ensure relevancy into the future? Here are five steps you can take:

  1. Take a class – the most common forms of visual storytelling are movies and television. Encourage, maybe even require, your staff to take screenwriting classes. Alternatively, periodically bring a professional screenwriter or script doctor in. Maybe even someone who writes and produces commercials. The ability to tell a story in 10-30 seconds is an art and most of the video content out there is going to continue to fall into this category.
  2. Push visuals as a given not a choice. Challenge your staff, your clients, and your agency to be more visual. Eliminate superfluous words in favor of stronger visuals. Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple marketing exec who worked on the introduction of the first Macintosh in 1984, famously penned the 10/20/30 rule for PowerPoint presentations. Ten slides, 20 minutes, no smaller than 30-point type. The latter being the most important from a visual standpoint because once you use 30-point type, the available real estate on a slide drops drastically.
  3. Hire for the skill. It’s impossible to get an entire agency or in-house department caught up in this movement at once. So finding people already skilled in the art of visual storytelling is a possible shortcut. Just understand that what they make up for in skillset they may lose in understanding the difference between PR and advertising. What’s interesting is how many PR firms are responding by hiring people outside of the typical PR agency world. Last fall, Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm, went on a hiring spree adding several senior level staff all from advertising and marketing firms.
  4. Share insights. The Millennial generation is the first generation that has grown up never knowing a world without the web. Their lives are so intrinsically connected to it that they are hard-pressed to fathom what life must have been like without it. This generation is also driving the visual evolution. So tap the members of that generation for personal and broader insights, and then feel free to share. They get that this is part of the process.
  5. Don’t fight it. For those in PR who are proud of their writing skills and accomplishments and may believe that the emphasis on visuals over text is like equating graphic novels to classic literature, have to realize that hanging on to outmoded methods is a fast track to irrelevancy. The ability to craft a well-written sentence then string several of those together to explain a particular point is still valuable. But the ability to mix pictures with those words to tell a more compelling story now trumps that ability.

There is a caveat. No matter how visually oriented the world becomes, everything can’t be about a story in pictures. Some aspects of the world will continue to become more complicated. Connecting words and pictures to make the biggest impact will be critical toward communicating those complicated elements in the most understandable way possible. The future of PR may depend on it.

Five Big Demographic Shifts and What They Mean for PR

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Much has been made of how demographic changes – primarily generational – are affecting media consumption. The focus continues to be primarily on Millennials across the world and their propensity to consume media on multiple screens while constantly being on the move.

What’s been missing, however, is a look at even deeper changes that are profoundly altering the demographics of entire countries and regions of the world, and what those changes could mean to the future of PR.
While there are a multitude of demographic changes to consider – such as shifts in wealth distribution, other age related issues, and immigration – the changes associated with age cut across multiple topics. George Magnus, famous economist and author, made some predictions related to age during a presentation he gave to the Conference Board in 2013. Let’s look at the five massive ones and how they impact PR.

1. Older not younger.
Over the next 35 years, there are expected to be more older citizens than children. That means about 418 million people in the world over the age of 60 by 2050. While most Baby Boomers will have since passed by then, that means a lot of older Millennials and Generation Z-ers inhabiting the earth. While their affinity to devices may vary by global region, they will bring their digital expectations with them, providing both opportunities and challenges. Public relations professionals will be tasked with staying current on information that will shift with the needs that come with growing older. That includes healthcare, shopping and travel options. Combine this with a generational expectation of transparency and the role of public relations in both ensuring transparency and combating charges of non-transparency will become even more prevalent.

2. Non-communicable diseases – new epidemics.
According to the Business Insider article, the World Health Organization has called the invisible epidemic of non-communicable diseases responsible for about 60% of deaths globally. The leading culprit is depression, which is expected to become the biggest single cause of disability by 2030. That will likely mean more pharmaceutical solutions entering the market across the world, but also more holistic options with populations in various global regions being more open to them than others. This may also force a more candid and open discussion of the issue and remove some of the stigma related to discussing it. Public relations has an opportunity to help drive this shift while also playing a part in the way different medications will be introduced into the market. The challenge will be to keep the fight against communicable diseases from taking a back seat in terms of awareness.

3. Faster to 60.
More people are reaching 60 than ever before. In most developed countries, it took about 40 – 80 years for those over 60 to double in size of population. In emerging markets, however, the process is playing out in about 20 years with China being the fastest to hit this mark. The result is that many people are growing old before they or the countries where they live can afford it. For PR professionals, this will mean the need for communication strategies tied to what will inevitably be strained resources, new government initiatives related to both financial and physical well-being, and new products touting the ability to help the aging population cope.

4. Who’s going to pay for it?
The issue here is around what is referred to as the old age dependency ratio — the number of workers available to support a single retired citizen. A low dependency ratio is where there are fewer workers available per older citizen. For instance, the 1.5 workers per retiree expected by 2050 in countries like Germany, Japan, Italy, and Spain where weak fertility, rising longevity and more stringent immigration policies are the cause. Meanwhile, economies like Sweden and France are predicted to have higher ratios that will fall from 4-5 workers today to about 2-2.5 by the mid-century. This is mostly due to higher fertility rates and a more open immigration policy. PR may be asked to create campaigns that will 1) keep workers working longer, 2) extol the virtues of helping support the elderly, and 3) loosen immigration policies to ensure a more manageable dependency ratio that isn’t available without it.

5. Exploiting the economic dividend.
There is an ideal economic phase where child dependency is falling and the working age population is expanding, and old age dependency is just on the brink of rising. Growth in income, savings, investment, and technical progress highlight this phase. Once the old age dependency ratio starts to rise, however, then all bets are off as it tends to drag down growth. Strong financial institutions, positive investment climate, stable infrastructure, and ongoing innovation allow countries to exploit this demographic dividend to their benefit. While PR can’t directly affect any of these elements, it can communicate what companies and government institutions are doing to improve and protect them. Consequently, PR will be called on in the future to effectively communicate the economic dividend to help ensure its longevity and benefits.

Understanding organizational change: Exceptional visualizations of evolving org charts

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Org charts have long been used to show people the formal reporting lines in organizations, usually as a hierarchy with different levels.

However organizations are regularly re-organized, requiring a new org chart to be created. In fact, organizations are completely dynamic, changing in ways small and large every single day.

A fantastic video (below) depicts the continuous and frequently dramatic changes in the org chart of Autodesk over a 4 year period, in what the creators describe as an OrgOrgChart (Organic Organizational Chart). It’s well worth watching.


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The future of law firms: new structures, virtualization, fluid talent, social media-driven reputation

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A little while ago an article The future for law firms: virtual law firms, legal outsourcing and the battle for talent appeared in Thomson Legal reporting on some of my thoughts on where the legal industry is headed.

The article opens:
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How to create an extraordinarily successful future for the news industry

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I recently did the opening keynote on Creating the Future of News at the International News & Media Association World Congress in New York, which brought together over 400 senior news executives from 45 countries.

Below is a video excerpt of the opening minutes of my keynote.

You can see a video of the complete keynote here, and the static presentation slides here (though much of my visual presentation was video).
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The potential of open source 3D printed housing and community

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This morning I was interviewed on the Mornings program about open source 3D printed houses.

You can view a video of the segment by clicking on the image below.
Mornings9_230615

We primarily discussed the fantastic Wikihouse project, which provides Creative Commons plans for parts which can be 3D printed or machine cut and readily assembled to build inexpensive homes.
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