Intertwining Artificial Intelligence With Blockchain

  

 Is your management team asking about the future

of your contact center technology & strategy? This webinar will show you how to avoid pitfalls when replacing infrastructure, as well as how to create an effective migration plan. Except for those folks living under rocks (sounds uncomfortable), everyone knows about or at least has heard of bitcoin. However, not everyone understands the technology of bitcoin, which extends well beyond Internet-based currency.For the rock people, bitcoin is an Internet-based currency that allows for transparency with respect to each transfer of the currency through the use of a distributed database. Each transaction is locked in a block, and blocks are connected to form a "blockchain."

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

The findings follow growing concern among politicians,

health bodies, doctors, charities and parents about young people suffering harm as a result of sexting, cyber bullying and social media reinforcing feelings of self-loathing and even the risk of them committing suicide. “It’s interesting to see Instagram and Snapchat ranking as the worst for mental health and wellbeing. Both platforms are very image-focused and it appears that they may be driving feelings of inadequacy and anxiety in young people,” said Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the Royal Society for Public Health, which undertook the survey with the Young Health Movement.

She demanded tough measures “to make social media less of a wild west when it comes to young people’s mental health and wellbeing”. Social media firms should bring in a pop-up image to warn young people that they have been using it a lot, while Instagram and similar platforms should alert users when photographs of people have been digitally manipulated, Cramer said. The 1,479 young people surveyed were asked to rate the impact of the five forms of social media on 14 different criteria of health and wellbeing, including their effect on sleep, anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-identity, bullying, body image and the fear of missing out.

Instagram emerged with the most negative score. It rated badly for seven of the 14 measures, particularly its impact on sleep, body image and fear of missing out — and also for bullying and feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness. However, young people cited its upsides too, including self-expression, self-identity and emotional support. YouTube scored very badly for its impact on sleep but positively in nine of the 14 categories, notably awareness and understanding of other people’s health experience, self-expression, loneliness, depression and emotional support.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
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Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Facebook and Twitter 'harm young people's mental health'

Young people scored Instagram the worst social medium for sleep,

body image and fear of missing out. Four of the five most popular forms of social media harm young people’s mental health, with Instagram the most damaging, according to research by two health organisations.Instagram has the most negative impact on young people’s mental wellbeing, a survey of almost 1,500 14- to 24-year-olds found, and the health groups accused it of deepening young people’s feelings of inadequacy and anxiety.

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Signs that you're addicted to Social Media

A new survey reveals that Instagram

Chuck Reynolds
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Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

They're using manipulative tricks from casinos, among other things.

On February 9, 2009, Facebook introduced the like button. Initially, the button was an innocent thing. It had nothing to do with hijacking the social reward systems of a user's brain. "The main intention I had was to make positivity the path of least resistance," explains Justin Rosenstein, one of the four Facebook designers behind the button. "And I think it succeeded in its goals, but it also created large unintended negative side effects. In a way, it was too successful."

Today, most of us reach for Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter with one vague thought in mind: Maybe someone liked my stuff. And it's this craving for validation, experienced by billions around the globe, that's currently pushing platform engagement in ways that in 2009 were unimaginable. But more than that, it's driving profits to levels that were previously impossible. "The attention economy" is a relatively new term. It describes the supply and demand of a person's attention, which is the commodity traded on the internet. The business model is simple: The more attention a platform can pull, the more effective its advertising space becomes, allowing it to charge advertisers more.

But the problem is that attention isn't some non-sentient resource like wheat or oil. Attentiveness is a human state, and our reserves of attention are finite. They're hemmed in by sleep, work, children, and relationships with friends who find it rude when we're on our phones. So ideally we'd want to invest our limited supply of attention on things that make us happy. But as Facebook observed, social feedback induces a burst of happiness so brief it's addictive, causing us to return more and scroll further.

"The like button, simple as it was, tapped into a bottomless font of social feedback," explains Adam Alter, author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. "And I don't think social media companies are trying to make 'addictive' platforms, per se. But since they're all competing for our (limited) time and attention, they've always been focused on making the most engaging experience possible."

Following the introduction of Facebook's like button in 2009, YouTube moved to a binary like/dislike format in 2010. Instagram launched that same year and came ready-made with a like function shaped as a heart. Twitter adopted this same heart-shaped system in 2015, while, in the years since, Silicon Valley has come up with a multitude of new ways to gamify our need for social validation.

Former Google designer and ethicist Tristan Harris lays out the most common ways we're being manipulated on his blog. And as he explains, all of them use something called intermittent variable rewards. The easiest way to understand this term is by imagining a slot machine. You pull the lever to win a prize, which is an intermittent action linked to a variable reward. Variable meaning you might win, or you might not. In the same way, you refresh your Facebook updates to see if you've won. Or you swipe right on Tinder to see if you've won.

This is the most obvious way social feedback drives platform engagement, but others are harder to spot. You know when you open Instagram or Twitter and it takes a few moments to load updates? That's no accident. Again, the expectation is part of what makes intermittent variable rewards so addictive. This is because, without that three-second delay, Instagram wouldn't feel variable. There's no sense of will I win? because you'd know instantly. So the delay isn't the app loading. It's the cogs spinning on the slot machine.

Another piece of psychology hijacked by social platforms is that of social reciprocity; if someone pats your back, you'll feel pressure to pat his or hers. Facebook exploits this by alerting you when someone has read your message, which encourages the receivers to respond—because they know you know they've read it. And at the same time, it encourages you to check back to read the inevitable response. The same bits of your brain get a rush on Facebook as a set of wavy dots appear as someone writes a message. You might not exit if you think you're getting a message, or at the very least you're more likely to come back. And while Apple also employs this feature, at least it allows you to turn it off.

All this might seem a little underhanded, but it's nothing compared to some of the design features currently showing up on Snapchat. Of these is the one causing the most concern, and uses elongating red lines to display the number days of since two users interacted. According to Adam Alter, this design feature is so effective that he's heard of teens asking friends to babysit their streaks while on vacation. "It's clear here that the goal—keeping the streak alive—is more important than enjoying the platform as a social experience," he says. "This is a clear sign that engagement mechanisms are driving usage more than enjoyment." We asked like button co-creator Justin Rosenstein what he thinks is the most insidious form of social media manipulation, and according to him, it's the humble push notification.

"The vast majority of push notifications are just distractions that pull us out of the moment," he says. "They get us hooked on pulling our phones out and getting lost in a quick hit of information that could wait for later, or doesn't matter at all." And of course, all these little efforts to keep us hooked are having a very real impact. As Facebook's current head of marketing bragged in this speech, the average millennial checks his or her phone 157 times daily. That's a total average of 145 minutes every day that we're trying to feel connected, validated, and liked.

The increasingly time-absorbing nature of the internet is one of the reasons Justin Rosenstein left Facebook to start his own company. Today he's the co-founder of Asana—a web and mobile app that tracks work app that tracks work and allows collaboration without distractions like email. But according to author Adam Alter, change will only come from the bottom up. He claims the social media business model, built around the needs of marketing agencies instead of lives, are already far too entrenched and profitable for self-governing.

"It might diminish a bit," he says. "But as long as companies have an incentive to make their platforms as engaging as possible, the arms race forcing them to 'manipulate' users will continue." He encourages users to try and curb their own addictions or to install phone apps that will do that for them. He also says that by demanding more ethical design practices from companies—in the same way that we demand ethical environmental practices—we'll force change and claw back our free time. Because as Like button co-creator Justin Rosenstein highlights, "These are our lives. Our precious, finite, mortal lives. And if we're not vigilant, computers and mobile devices will guide our attention poorly."

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Movers & Shakers:
Anna Braun, JT Mega, director of business development

             

ANNA BRAUN — Director of business development

Anna Braun is helping to build a course for future growth as director of business development at Minneapolis-based food advertising agency JT Mega. Braun said the agency has been interested in adding leadership to build on its strong organic growth, which led to the creation of the new role that she has taken. "The thing that's exciting about JT Mega is there is so much opportunity for continued smart growth," Braun said. "To work with a great foundation and start carving out what some of the next business opportunities look like is really exciting to me."

Braun's responsibilities also include developing new business strategy, leading business acquisition efforts and establishing industry relationships. She previously led brand business initiatives as a marketing manager at Polaris and worked as an account supervisor at Periscope. "I really love the combination of business management and agency creativity and agency strategic work," Braun said. "For me, this role is a perfect mix of that."

JT Mega, founded in 1976, is an independent agency whose clients include Hormel Foods, Land O'Lakes, and the Schwan Food Co.

Q: What's driving the agency's focus on business development?

A: It's been on the forefront of the owners' and the leaders' minds here. They realized that as organic growth opportunities were coming there's a big opportunity for someone to come in and be able to focus specifically on this (new business) effort and help lead that. This industry is changing so rapidly and there's a lot of growth in different areas within the business. You see where the industry is going and now it's: "How do we proactively start carving out space where the industry is growing?"

Q: What are some possible growth areas?

A: The two areas of focus are absolutely expanding our foundation in food service and building on the retail space. We work a lot with clients selling into K-12, into the commercial space. A handful of clients sell directly into retail and direct to consumers. We're looking at where some opportunities in the retail space that would make sense for us.

Q: Why should a company work with JT Mega?

A: We work as an extension of the client's team, bringing a different point of view to the table. We understand the nuances of what it means to be in the [food and beverage] industry. The other thing is our scalability. We work with small, medium and big companies both in the B2B and B2C space. That's something that we really enjoy especially with how quickly this industry is evolving.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Business Development Associate
at Full Harvest

At Full Harvest, we are disrupting the agriculture space by solving farm food waste and bringing technology to a market where there was none. We are the first B2B platform connecting farms with food businesses to sell discounted, yet perfectly good surplus and imperfectly shaped produce that would have otherwise gone to waste. A huge environmental problem as approximately 20 billion pounds of produce goes to waste in the U.S. annually simply because they are not perfectly shaped for strict retailer standards.

As Business Development Associate, you’ll play a critical role in growing the company. You’ll have the opportunity to develop and shape systems and strategies as you design Full Harvest’s sales processes with food & beverage customers. You’ll work with buyers (food manufacturers) to close new accounts. You will attend various conferences and events as well as leverage your networks in the food and ag space to significantly build the business.

Additional Responsibilities:

Serve as an outside sales/ business development person to fill pipeline of new buy side food & beverage customers, working closely with the CEO and Director of Sales

– Identify potential buyer accounts, leveraging your network
– Attend food and agriculture events to network and build relationships with buyers
– Reach out to potential new accounts via phone, email, and in-person meetings to fact find and generate new leads
– Negotiate contracts and close the sales
– Serve as liaison between buyers and manage communication to finalize sales
– Support new buyer operational roll-out
– Research market to determine appropriate pricing for different items  Qualifications:
– Passion for Full Harvest’s mission
– Persistent go-getter with 5+ years of experience in sales, preferably working with large food CPG and/or agricultural companies
– BA, preferably in business
– Strong network with healthy food manufacturers
– Experienced project manager who can juggle a lot of moving parts with strong execution / operational roll-out skills
– Proactive / Takes initiative; ability to work independently
– Strong interpersonal skills and customer-facing experience
– Previous startup experience strongly preferred
– Knowledge and understanding of food manufacturing and/or produce industry
– Some travel will be required

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

FirstClose names Jorge Ponce
director of business development

Ponce will oversee driving adoption, Client Communication, and Product Development

  

FirstClose has announced it has hired Jorge Ponce as director of business development.

Ponce has more than 15 years of experience in bank operations, mortgage and risk-based consumer lending. He will be responsible for driving adoption, client communication and product development for FirstClose, end-to-end technology solutions for refinancing and home equity lenders and 2017 HW Tech100 winner.

Ponce previously worked as a home equity product manager for New York-based Bethpage Federal Credit Union, which uses the FirstClose Report. Ponce is well-versed in the FirstClose system and was instrumental in helping to build the first version of the FirstClose Report, a comprehensive refinance and home equity loan solution with capabilities to deliver title, flood, valuation and other important data elements in one report, FirstClose said in a press release.

“With his experience and background in the credit union space, Jorge will deliver exceptional results to our financial institution partners,” said Tedd Smith, co-founder and chief executive officer of FirstClose, an Austin, Texas-based company.

Chuck Reynolds
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Please click either Link to Learn more about Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member