Mediaboss Marketing

August 18, 2017

Bots are the smartest addition to your marketing team available.

Murray Newlands

VIP Contributor

If you own a business, you can't afford to ignore chatbots. While often considered a simple customer service tool, these machines can now help businesses automate a huge variety of processes. They can also act as virtual assistants, giving back time to employees to focus on more important, revenue-generating activities. You need to know how to build a chatbot for your marketing campaign and how you can make the most of it.

Thanks to advancements in the artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) that powers these machines, they're now capable of undertaking a huge variety of tasks, making them an integral part of your various teams. With machine learning, they're able to learn from the data they gather, thus allowing them to engage with your customers where they're most likely to be: on social media messaging applications.

With that in mind, you can now integrate your chatbot into your social media advertising and digital marketing campaigns as a whole. Luckily, today, with the help of chatbot building solutions like ChattyPeople, you can create a chatbot in a matter of minutes, for free, without any prior programming experience whatsoever.

Related:Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business

The platform comes with a visual interface and a powerful dashboard that gives you a 360-degree view of your audience. Moreover, these chatbots can be specifically designed to help with your online marketing campaigns by:

Simply building a chatbot is not enough to effectively implement it into your organization's scheme. To create an efficient chatbot for your marketing campaign, you must remember to:

As with every marketing campaign, you need to establish what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it, and the same goes for your chatbot. By implementing a chatbot into your marketing campaign, it's important to have a vision for it. Know which part of your campaign you want your chatbot to focus on and design it once you have these measurable goals in mind.

Related:Enterprise Chatbots Platforms and the Future of Work

To capitalize on the use of a chatbot as part of your marketing campaign, you need to know who it will be communicating with. Get to know your audience so that your chatbot can establish the best tone of voice, which products to push, and of course, where to interact with them. Your virtual assistant can draw information from social media profiles, browsing habits, and other sources to then to provide tailored ads that speak to each customer.

Chatbots can track user data, so you should be collecting as much information as possible. Not only will it allow you to improve its performance, but also improve your marketing campaign as a whole. With the information your chatbot collects, you can identify common problems customers are facing and fix them to boost your interactions and sales.

Related:Enterprise Chatbots and the Conversational Commerce Revolutionizing Business

Many businesses have a reactive approach to customer engagement. In other words, they wait for a customer to start a conversation with them. Make sure your audience knows that your chatbot is available to help by sending a quick 'Hello' message as soon as they land on your website or social media pages. They'll be more likely to engage with it in the future, thus enabling you to gather more data.

Traditional advertising and hard-selling methods no longer work like they use to. With that in mind, you have to have more of an inbound marketing approach. Simply put, you need to have a "customer comes first" mentality.

Your chatbot should be designed with the aim of fulfilling a specific duty that will be valuable to your audience. Instead of packing it with a variety of glitchy features, deliver one flawless function at a time and make its abilities clear to each user it interacts with in order to set expectations.

If you create a chatbot that is unable to undertake one task, this will leave customers with a poor impression of your brand. Be sure to align your chatbots functionalities with your marketing campaign's goals.

Related:How to Create a Facebook Messenger Chatbot For Free Without Coding

While you don't want your chatbot to come off rude or abrasive, giving it a level of personality is recommended. Train it to reflect your brand's vision and tone of voice. Make sure this personality aligns with your target audience and, of course, the industry in which you are operating. For example, if you want to implement a chatbot into your football marketing campaign, it would not have the same tone of voice as one designed for a banking firm.

One of the best and most practical features that modern chatbots can offer is the delivery of on demand personalized promotions and offers to consumers. By gathering data from social media profiles and past interactions, chatbots can learn about consumer behaviors, shopping preferences, and more.

Related:Make Chats WithChatbotsWork

To create an effective chatbot for your marketing campaign, you first need to establish your buyer personas. From there, your chatbot can reach out to your potential customers in real time and qualify them automatically to provide you with high-quality leads. The chatbot you implement for your marketing campaign can work closely with your sales team, nurturing your leads as they go through their buyer journey, eventually leading them onto your sales department.

Every time your chatbot has an interaction where it answers questions about products or services, or even gives shopping advice, it should be able to offer an upgrade, insights into new products, or information on products that could complement their current choices based on the user's shopping preferences. By doing so, your chatbot will also become an upselling and cross-selling tool that will help you generate more sales.

Related:The How-To: UsingChatbotsAs A Tool For Customer Service

Chatbots aren't going anywhere anytime soon and to stay ahead of your competition and increase sales, it is important that you implement yours where it is likely to offer the most value to your customers. Follow the steps I outlined above to create a chatbot that can help increase awareness of your marketing campaign and help you make more sales.

Read the original:
Instead of Staffing Up For Your Marketing Campaign, Build A Chatbot. - Entrepreneur

In our contemporary world, the power of social media couldnt be stressed more. According to reliable sources, there are over 80% of Americans that have Facebook profiles. In fact, its even more difficult to identify people that arent active on social media platforms than find people who are.

Popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, have done exceptionally well to connect lives. And, unlike the days of yesteryears, people in the 21st Century are no longer swayed or attracted by non-traditional marketing methods. They are more interested in whats trending on the internet. Hence, if you run a business, its imperative for you to market your brand through social media platforms. And, to do that, you must integrate social sharing widgets into your websites to ensure that the visitors can share the products and services they prefer.

You can derive numerous benefits from social media marketing.

This is easy. You have a business to run and cant focus on all the details that social media marketing requires.

Its of serious importance for you to optimize your presence on social media. This will help you communicate better with your customers and visitors. It works similarly to a communication platform. Now, whats the benefit of being able to communicate directly with your customers and visitors? Well, if theres direct communication, you will be able to respond to their suggestions, questions, and complaints in a short period of time. In addition to that, you will also be able to tell them about the upgrades in your products and services. If you respond to your customers quicker, it will help improve your brand value and let the customers know that you only have business in mind! Strong online presence will only help your business build a better relationship with the customers. You will be able to provide products and services that meet their requirements.

This mode of communication will ultimately strengthen your relationship with your customers and it will help you cater to the needs and requirements of your customers as well. If not done well, it could cost you in sales and potential customers.

Contact Unofficial today to discuss how we can help manage your social media marketing!

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The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Marketing - 38632 Unofficial

In the aftermath of a violent protest in Charlottesville, Va., that left three dead and thrust neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalists back into the public eye, tech companies big and small have turned their back on far-right extremists by cutting off access to revenue and canceling service effectively banishing them to the far corners of the Internet.

The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, went offline. PayPal stopped transactions that benefited hate groups and their supporters. And OkCupid revoked the dating privileges of known white supremacists.

While some antiracist activists and tech leaders applauded the impact the digital ice-out would have on extremists reach and revenue, others worried that tech firms may have gone too far: Could they do the same to any group that challenges popular ideals or opposes the interests of Silicon Valley?

The same policies against hate speech or hate groups or terrorist propaganda that are leading companies to take down the Daily Stormer and its folk are routinely used against groups on all sides of the political spectrum that dont advocate violent ideology whatsoever, said Emma Llans, the director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Any tool that enables censorship online can be used against potentially everyone regardless of ideology.

White nationalists and free-speech activists have begun building alternatives to the mainstream Internet in an effort to operate outside the rules and norms of Silicon Valley, on networks where hate speech and extremist organizations can exist unchecked.

But there are significant drawbacks, said Cody Wilson, who helped to create Hatreon, an alternative to the better-known Patreon, a website that allows content creators to receive financial support from users.

No one truly wants to rebuild 20 years of Internet infrastructure so they dont have to engage in these full-scale social purges, said Wilson. Theres not a lot of money or talent behind the so-called alt-tech. This isnt a thing where were like, Oh, were going build a whole new world. It doesnt work that way.

Wilson doesnt align himself politically with white nationalists or far-right extremists. But he believes that they, too, should have a forum to express themselves.

Hatreon, which has about 1,000 users, was booted off of its infrastructure provider, DigitalOcean, Friday amid a widespread purge of hate groups from the Internets most prominent gatekeepers.

Several online civil rights groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology and San Francisco advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have questioned the power of big tech firms and cautioned those who cheer the dismantling of Nazi websites that they could be next.

After terminating its contract with the Daily Stormer, Matthew Prince, the CEO of website security firm Cloudflare, said in an interview with TechCrunch that the power Internet companies have is troubling, and without a system in place to regulate decisions that result in censorship, its unlikely those decisions will be made objectively.

Privately owned tech companies are not subject to the First Amendment, which ensures the right to speech free from government censorship. Most, instead, operate in accordance with their own terms of service.

But even then it can be hard to tell whether a company is implementing its rules fairly or singling out certain people or groups that it may not like, Llans said.

We need more transparency across the board, she said. Its kind of hard to talk about content moderation when we still dont have very good information about what social media platforms are actually doing.

Even the open Web, a supposed free-for-all, has posed challenges for far-right groups. GoDaddy and Google refused to manage the Daily Stormers Internet domain, forcing it to bounce around to several different domains including one on the dark Web and another in Russia before resurfacing with the unlikely address dailystormer.lol through the domain registrar NameCheap.

NameCheap did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though the companys terms of service explicitly outlaw hate sites.

Discord, a voice chat service popular among video game enthusiasts that had been instrumental in organizing far-right extremists, axed several accounts, chat rooms and servers affiliated with neo-Nazi sentiments or white nationalist groups.

Google also banned social network Gab, billed as the far-rights version of Twitter, from its Android app store Thursday.

Our online community leans libertarian, small-c conservative, and anti-corporatist left, Gab spokesman Ustav Sanduja wrote in an email.

Since then, the social network has raised $400,000 from its users, Sanduja said, pushing its total contributions since July to more than $1 million. Gab, which has 207,000 users, was founded by Bay Area entrepreneur Andrew Torba, who considers the social network a haven for Internet separatists.

Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and Facebook have long been the subject of criticism both for suspending and banning accounts because of the content they publish on those sites and also for not doing enough to combat hate speech and harassment.

Facebook and YouTube have recently announced plans to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to better identify and more quickly suspend groups that promote hate speech and white nationalist ideologies on the social networks.

We all felt this righteous indignation after what happened (in Charlottesville), and fair enough, Hatreons Wilson said. But look, if some radical San Francisco LGBT group got kicked off the Internet for violating terms of service, we would all be having a very different conversation.

Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mlang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Marissa_Jae

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Tech response to extremism fuels debate on censorship - San Francisco Chronicle

Google has removed the Gab app from Google Play because they claim it violates their speech policy:

Is anyone surprised the company that fired a man for pointing out that men and women are different would consider a free speech site like Gab hate speech?

People who think silencing those they disagree with is a good thing certainly arent capable of understanding this simple point.

Considering how subjective hate is, how do they determine what should be banned? Most Conservatives believe abortion is hateful, but we dont see Google banning or suspending Planned Parenthood.

This is pretty simple, were not sure why Lefties cant figure this out. If you dont like Gab, dont go there. Dont download the app. Why take it from other people who do go there and who want the app?

Freedom isnt always pretty, and whether you like it or not, haters still have the right to be hateful in this country.

And no amount of banning will change that.

And we thought 2016 was stupid.

Related:

SHOCKER: Woman who resisted by destroying Durham Confederate statue is pro-N. Korea Marxist

Read more from the original source:
'Full net censorship is HERE': Google moves to de-platform Gab for being a 'hate site' - Twitchy

Denali wolf (Photo courtesy of National Park service)

The states largest wolf control program was the target of a protest outside Alaska Department of Fish and Game Fairbanks headquarters on Thursday. The protesters organized by Alaskans for Wildlife want Fish and Game to immediately halt the long running aerial wolf kill in the Forty Mile River region, east of Fairbanks.

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A group of about 50 protesters howled and chanted outside the Fish and Game office, expressing dismay with the annual Forty Mile aerial wolf kill.

The winter spring wolf hunt is aimed at growing the Forty Mile caribou herd, but recent Fish and Game research shows it hasnt worked. The state plans to suspend the program next spring, not soon enough for protester and hunter Frank Maxwell.

Limitations on caribou populations are not due to wolves or predation, Maxwell said. Its due to nutritional stress as their studies have said. So its just wasting animals, wasting life and wasting money.

Over a thousand wolves have been shot from aircraft in the state program since 2004, with the harvest ramping up in recent years. Fish and Game regional supervisor Darren Bruning said despite indications that habitat is limiting caribou herd growth, the state will continue the wolf kill another year, for research reasons.

Having seven years of high intensity removal data to compare to the previous seven years of low intensity removal data is the most consistent reasonable and responsibleapproach, Bruning said.

Bruning maintains the comparison data is important to all interests.

Including the international, 40-mile harvest management coalition, and those who do not support predation control or are unsure about its benefit, Bruning said.

Bruning said the program will halt in the spring of 2018 after which biologists will see how the caribou fare without wolf control. Protester Sean McGuire with Alaskans for Wildlife says continuing the wolf kill for another season, just for science, is wrong.

I mean, these wolves are very intelligent, highly social creatures, McGuire said. To run an experiment on them when its not even gonna help the caribou herd, that is really outrageous.

McGuire adds that the predator control program costs Fish and Game over thirty seven thousand dollars per wolf harvested, spending the cash strapped state cannot afford. The states Bruning emphasizes that the Forty Mile area wolf kill is only being temporarily halted. He could not say when it would resume.

Read more from the original source:
Fairbanks protesters organize against the state wolf control program ... - Alaska Public Radio Network