Innovating and advocating for accessible classrooms
We’re continually working to improve access to inclusive tools, from building two free screen readers into Chromebooks to providing voice typing and live captions with Google Workspace for Education. But as far as we’ve all come in bringing accessible teaching and learning tools into our classrooms, there is always more to do about digital inclusion.
Today, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we at Google want to celebrate the great work that teachers have done to bring acceptance and inclusion into their schools — while we commit ourselves to more innovation with and for people with disabilities in the future.For example, we’re celebrating people like Chang-Dong Ryu, who teaches history at Seohyun Middle School in South Korea. Ryu is blind, and uses Google Classroom’s accessibility features to teach his students deeper lessons about acceptance and ability. “What I can do best is teach my students that value that comes with being ‘different,’” Ryu told us in a video we shared in February. “That way, when my students meet new friends and colleagues with visual impairments, they will accept them into their community as equals.”
We’re continuing to tell more stories of educators and students with disabilities, and show more representation across our community, as we build with and for people with disabilities.
Building a more inclusive Chrome OS
In keeping with our goal to learn from users of our accessibility tools, and to give people with disabilities an even playing field, we continue to build new tools for accessibility in Google for Education solutions, with and for people with disabilities. Here are a selection of the latest features, all available on your Chromebook today:
Live captioning:Chrome Browser now has a Live Caption feature that automatically provides real-time captions for media with audio. The live captioning works with social media and video sites, podcasts and radio content, personal video libraries (such as Google Photos) and embedded video players. For students with hearing disabilities, the captions help improve accessibility of online content. In a noisy classroom environment, or one where students need to keep volume low on their school devices, the captions are helpful for any students. To turn on Live Caption, go to Chromebook settings, then “Accessibility.”
Mouse panning: Chrome OS now offers centered mouse panning. This means that when students and teachers with vision disabilities are using the full-screen magnifier, they can now move the viewport while keeping the mouse or trackpad close to, or directly on, the center of the screen. This makes it much easier to navigate around the screen, as users don’t need to move the mouse to the edge of the screen to move the zoomed-in area – much better for accessing all learning content.
Activating ChromeVox:For users of ChromeVox, the screen reader that’s built into Chromebooks, the first time they open up a Chromebook, after 20 seconds of inactivity, they’ll hear audio and visual instructions for activating ChromeVox. For students and teachers who need screen readers but haven’t yet used ChromeVox, there is a new tutorial available after turning on the screen reader for the first time, and is available in ChromeVox settings. The instructions are very helpful for getting started without hesitation.
Image descriptions on Android:For people who use screen readers on Chromebooks, the “get image descriptions” feature provides descriptions of unlabeled images, such as those that don’t have alt text. This feature will soon be brought to Android devices. When students with vision disabilities are using Chromebooks or Android phones or tablets to access online content, they’ll be able to have a better understanding of the images they come across, similar to their sighted classmates.
Forced colors:For students using the Chrome Browser on Windows who need high contrast in order to read text and see image details, Chrome now supports Windows’ OS level high contrast settings. The extension lets people choose filters to adjust color contrast, flip black and white or remove colors altogether.
Enhanced Select-to-speak:As mentioned in Chromebook’s 10th birthday post, new features let students and teachers speed up, slow down and pause the reading voice in real-time, and easily jump to different sections of text. Students with disabilities —or anyone who needs help comprehending a challenging reading assignment — can use these new Select-to-speak features to listen at their own pace.
To learn more about the accessibility tools built into Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education, check out edu.google.com/accessibility, share this one pager, watch video tutorials on accessibility features, or learn more on our Help Center.
16 updates from Google I/O that’ll make your life easier
Part of our mission is to help make your daily life easier. At I/O this year, we shared news about a wide range of products and services that’ll do just that, from starting your car with your phone to searching your screenshots using Google Lens. Here are just a few of the features you should keep an eye out for.
Quickly view your notifications, invoke Google Assistant on Android.
Android 12 includes the biggest design change since 2014. We rethought the entire experience, from the colors to the shapes, light and motion, and made it easier to access some of the most used features:
- To invoke Google Assistant wherever you are, long press the power button.
- Swipe down to view your new notification shade, an at-a-glance view of all your app notifications in one place.
- And to make it easier to access everything you need, Google Pay and Device Controls have been added to your customizable quick settings.
Manage your privacy settings more easily on Android.
On top of the new design changes, we’ve also launched a new Privacy Dashboard, giving you easy access to your permissions settings, visibility into what data is being accessed and the ability to revoke permissions on the spot. You also have new indicators that let you know when apps are using your microphone and camera, as well as a way to quickly shut off that access. And we’ve added new microphone and camera toggles into quick settings so you can easily remove app access to these sensors for the entire system. Learn about new privacy controls in Android 12.
Change the channel with your phone.
Lost your TV remote? Don’t sweat it — we’re building remote-control features directly into your Android phone. Another bonus: If you need to enter a long password to log into one of your many streaming services subscriptions, you can save time and use your phone’s keyboard to enter the text. This built-in remote control will be compatible with devices powered by Android TV OS, including Google TV, and it’ll roll out later this year. Learn more about how we’re helping your devices work better together.
10 Ways to Drive Revenue through Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi
Huge congratulations to Joe Pulizzi on the release of the completely updated and expanded edition of Content Inc. Also thanks to Joe for contributing one of the handful of guest posts we’ve ever accepted here at TopRank’s B2B Marketing Blog. Along with thousands of other marketers, I’ve learned a lot from Joe and you will too.
Read on to discover 10 ways you can drive revenue for your business through content marketing from the Godfather of Content Marketing himself:
Whether you are a marketing professional, content entrepreneur or a media executive, driving revenue from an audience is always the same. Once you build a loyal and trusting audience through your content marketing or media strategy, there are 10 different ways to generate revenue: six direct sources and four indirect sources.
Direct revenue options are generally aligned with media models. Indirect sources are considered the result of content marketing strategies. Regardless of what you “perceive” your organization to be, a smart content marketing professional should consider all 10 sources as options when building a content asset.
Direct Revenue Options
The six different methods by which companies can directly generate revenues from an audience group include advertising/sponsorship, conferences and events, premium content offerings, donations, affiliate sales, and subscriptions.
- Advertising/Sponsorship
The most popular method of driving direct revenues is through advertising and sponsorship programs—companies willing to pay you for direct access to your audience.
Traditional Advertising
Tested by time, traditional advertising still works very well, especially for those organizations with loyal, niche audiences.
- How to Cook That. Ann Reardon, the YouTube baking queen who now has more than 4 million subscribers to her YouTube channel How to Cook That, makes the majority of her revenues from YouTube advertising royalties. With very few resources, Ann was able to differentiate her message by focusing on what she calls “impossible food creations.”
- Morning Brew. The Morning Brew is a daily email newsletter built for millennials that combines business and lifestyle content with a quirky attitude. Each newsletter includes content-based advertising from brands written in the same style as the newsletter. Since its launch, the Morning Brew has added a number of targeted email newsletters and podcasts, increasing revenue from $3 million in 2018 to more than $20 million in 2020.
Sponsorships
While an advertisement generally involves interrupting a user’s experience with a product or content promotion, a sponsorship entails underwriting a piece of content, generally by one company. The benefits of sponsorships include getting leads (through a sponsored download) and/or achieving brand awareness (by sponsoring a podcast or television program).
- Content Marketing Institute. CMI favored a sponsorship model over an advertising model for the majority of its products. This included sponsored research reports, e-books, and webinars.
- Media Voices. UK-based Media Voices started as a weekly podcast designed for publishers in 2016. After launching at approximately $600 per sponsorship, it has evolved the model and charges about $3,000 per sponsorship today.
- Conferences and Events
According to CMI/MarketingProfs research, approximately 7 in 10 enterprises create and manage their own events. Some of these are small client gatherings, while others are full-scale events with exhibition halls and concurrent sessions. Revenues are mostly driven through paid event registration or sponsorships, such as parties or exhibition space.
- The Chicken Whisperer. Andy Schneider grew the Chicken Whisperer platform into a book, a magazine (with more than 60,000 subscribers), and a radio show, which has now run for more than seven years with more than 20,000 weekly subscribers. But sponsored road shows are a core part of his revenue mix.
- Inkers Con. After launching multiple bestselling books and a popular book publishing training course, Alessandra Torre created the event Inkers Con Authors Conference. “If you can make it through that first year, the second year [is] so much easier. We made all of our mistakes in the first year, and it still ended up being a fantastic event,” says Torre. The 2019 physical conference sold 400 tickets, while the 2020 virtual event sold 750 tickets at $245 per person.
- Lennox Live. Lennox is one of the largest manufacturers of heating and air-conditioning equipment in the world. Every year, the event attracts the leading contractors and distributors from across the United States, offering education around technology, marketing, and business practices. Exhibiting partners include companies such as Honeywell, Cintas, and Fluke. Lennox generates revenue directly from attendee fees, as well as from more than a dozen manufacturing and service partners.
- Premium Content
Premium content packages come in a number of forms, including direct-for-sale content products and syndicated content opportunities.
Content Products
- Digital Photography School (DPS). Darren Rowse launched DPS as the leading source for beginning photographers, showing them how they can get the most out of their picture-taking skills. DPS generates millions per year by developing premium e-books and specialty reports for direct sale. DPS’s premium content sales have become core to the company’s monetization strategy.
- BuzzFeed (Tasty). One of the ways BuzzFeed monetizes is through customized cookbooks. BuzzFeed launched Tasty: The Cookbook, a hard-copy book that buyers can customize to fit their tastes. Just a few weeks after initial launch, BuzzFeed sold more than 100,000 copies of the cookbook.
Syndicated Content
Content syndication happens when third-party websites pay a fee to publish original created content.
- Red Bull. Red Bull’s “Content Pool” contains thousands of videos, photographs, and pieces of music to which media companies and content producers can purchase rights, directly from Red Bull.
- Scott Adams. The Dilbert creator is now a multimillionaire who draws revenue through speaking and writing books, in addition to comic strips. Adams got his start by syndicating the popular Dilbert cartoon to newspapers and websites around the globe.
- Donations
Generally, donations to subsidize an organization’s publishing work best for not-for-profit and cause organizations.
- Pro Publica. Pro Publica is a nonprofit organization that uses its funding to develop investigative journalism. Founded by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, Pro Publica employs more than 50 journalists and received its major funding from the Sandler Corporation, which committed funding for multiple years at Pro Publica’s launch. Pro Publica also accepts ongoing donations from anyone that believes in the organization’s cause.
- Mother Jones. Like Pro Publica, Mother Jones receives most of its funding through direct reader donations (Figure 18.2), and it includes a call to action at the end of every article.
- Cards Against Humanity. In 2013, the card game ran a “Give Cards Against Humanity $5 Sale,” where they asked their audience for 5 dollars in exchange for absolutely nothing. They made over $70,000 without selling a thing.
Microfunding
- Kickstarter/Go Fund Me. Retired US Army officer Brian Stehle dreamed of writing a children’s book, but he needed funds to pay for the up-front production. Brian turned to Kickstarter, asking friends and family to donate the $4,200 in startup costs. It only took a few days for Brian to achieve his goal. Now his children’s Christmas book, One Day Off, is a reality.
- Creator Coins. Creator coins or token allows the owner to control and coordinate the value of their brand and content across all networks. Companies like Rally.io mint a coin on the Ethereum (ERC-20) network and then give access to the owner to share the coin with their community. Most times, the coins give the audience get access to unique prizes or events, but as the network grows, some coins begin to collect significant value. We’ve had great success with our own creator coin, $TILT coin, and partnered with Rally for the roll out. This is in the early stages, but there is true potential in this space. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) like these have already taken off in the art space on sites such as SuperRare, MakersPlace and OpenSea.
- Affiliate Sales
Affiliate income works like this: if you click on my affiliate link and sign up for the products and services I recommend, then I earn a commission.
- Entrepreneurs On Fire (EOF). EOF is the popular podcast series run by John Lee Dumas. John promotes a number of companies that pay an affiliate fee to John on either click or actual product sale. EOF publishes revenues and profits every month.
- The Wirecutter. The Wirecutter, the gadget and deal listing site, was purchased by the New York Times in 2016 for $30 million. The site makes a little bit of money every time it sells a product recommended on the site. These deals add up. In 2015, it generated more than $150 million from affiliate revenues.
- BuzzFeed. According to the Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed collected more than $300 million in 2019 solely from affiliate links.
- Subscriptions
Subscriptions differ from premium content in that subscriptions, paid for by the consumer, promise to deliver content over a period of time (generally a year).
- Copyblogger. After selling its software products division, Brian Clark focused Copyblogger’s revenue on education and training, creating Copyblogger Pro, an annual membership program that includes foundational training, monthly advanced marketing master classes, and ongoing coaching for $495 per year.
- Agency Management Institute. Owner Drew McLellan has a number of revenue drivers for his business, including sponsorships and events. The main lever is an annual membership where agency owners get the opportunity to meet with other agency owners in private meetings throughout the year. There are multiple levels of membership, with the highest at $3,000 per year.
- The Hub. Launching the site initially as a UK Facebook group, Laura Moore and Laura Davis created The Hub, a membership site for social media managers. “We targeted 50 members for the first three months, but exceeded 100,” says Moore. They completed their first year as a membership site with approximately $300,000 in income.
Indirect Revenue Options
While direct revenue options have been traditionally considered part of the media company model, indirect revenues fall under the approach known as content marketing. This means you don’t make money directly from the content, but from the effect of the content over time.
- Product Sales
- Chili Klaus. Claus Pilgaard, aka Chili Klaus, is one of the best-known celebrity figures in Denmark, all because of the extraordinary way he talks about chili peppers. Claus’s YouTube videos have garnered millions of views, including one where Claus conducts the Danish National Chamber Orchestra playing “Tango Jalousie” while eating the world’s hottest chili peppers. That video alone has seen more than 5 million views. From this success, Claus has launched a suite of successful products under the brand “Chili Klaus,” including chili chips, chili sauce, chili licorice, and dozens of other products.
- Indium Corporation. Indium, a global manufacturing company headquartered in upstate New York, develops and manufactures materials used primarily in electronics assembly. At its core, the company develops soldering materials to keep electronic components from coming apart. Rick Short, Indium’s director of marketing communications, knew that Indium employees had more knowledge about industrial soldering equipment than just about any other company in the world. This makes sense. Soldering is the knowledge area where Indium manufactures most of its products. Indium believed that if it published its expertise on a regular basis, it would draw in new customers and have opportunities to sell more products. Today Indium’s blog From One Engineer to Another is the company’s leading driver of new product sales.
- Missouri Star Quilt Company. Jenny Doan is the cofounder of the Missouri Star Quilt Company, a quilt shop in Hamilton that boasts the largest selection of precut fabrics in the world. To spur sagging sales, Jenny created quilting video tutorials to post on YouTube. The videos have driven new traffic to the shop’s website, gaining an average of 2,000 online sales per day and making it the world’s largest supplier of precut fabrics (worth almost $200 million a year).
- MrBeast. After developing one of the most successful YouTube channels in history with over 50 million subscribers, MrBeast (aka Jimmy Donaldson) launched MrBeast Burger in over 300 locations simultaneously.
- Services Sales
- Game Theory. Today Matthew Patrick’s Game Theory brand has more than 8 million subscribers. From this success, Matthew launched Theorists Inc., a specialty consulting firm that works with large brands that want to be successful on YouTube. Theorists Inc. has been hired directly by some of the biggest YouTube stars on the planet to help them attract more viewers, as well as has been hired by a number of Fortune 500 companies. Even the mighty YouTube itself hired Theorists to consult directly on helping YouTube retain and grow its audience numbers.
- Smart Simple Marketing. Sydni Craig-Hart launched Smart Simple as a marketing consulting firm with her husband, Will, in 2006. Today Smart Simple is one of the leading marketing agencies focused on diversity issues. How did it get there? “We’ve actually produced 439 [content-based] programs over the last 14 years,” says Sydni. That kind of consistent delivery led to a weekly email newsletter with more than 30,000 subscribers:
- Loyalty Revenue
Of all the revenue drivers of this approach, loyalty is the oldest of them all, and it is still extremely important today. Organizations of all sizes originally launched print magazines to keep customer loyalty over time.
- John Deere’s The Furrow Magazine. John Deere launched The Furrow magazine in 1895. It is still published today, produced in print and digital format in 14 different languages and distributed to 40 countries. The Furrow has always focused on how farmers can learn the latest technology to grow their farms and businesses. Over the past 100 years, just a handful of the articles have been about John Deere products and services.
- Harley-Davidson’s The Enthusiast magazine. Harley-Davidson Motorcycles has one of the most loyal followings in the world. One reason is its print and digital magazine, The Enthusiast (formerly HOG magazine). The magazine, first published in 2016, is now sent every quarter to 650,000 customers.
- Increased Yield on Current Customers
Once acquiring a customer, innovative companies leverage customer data to deliver targeted and consistent publications to, in essence, create better customers over time.
- thinkMoney from TD Ameritrade. Some investing services are conservative and buttoned-down, especially in complex derivatives markets, but thinkMoney follows a different approach. It takes the subject of investing seriously, but it doesn’t take itself with the grim seriousness of many Wall Street firms. Instead, thinkMoney embraces a “sophisticated simplicity” approach that’s edgy without being flippant, and witty without being irreverent. Research from T3, thinkMoney’s publisher, found that those who read the magazine trade five times more often than those who do not.
- Fold Factory. Trish Witkowski, CEO of Fold Factory, has become a celebrity in the direct mailing industry through her regular video show, The 60-Second Super Cool Fold of the Week, where she details amazing examples of print direct mail. In 2020, Trish hit the 500th episode of the series, which marked 10 years of production and the creation of 500 different T-shirts, which she sells. The Fold Factory videos have been directly responsible for more than $750,000 in revenue.
The most successful content creators leverage not one, but multiple streams of revenue. Whether you consider yourself a marketer or part of a media company, we are all publishers. Just as an investor diversifies a portfolio with multiple stocks and/or mutual funds, content creators need to diversify the revenue streams generated from their content and audience building.
Joe Pulizzi’s new book, Content Inc.: Start a Content-First Business, Build a Massive Audience, and Become Radically Successful (with Little to No Money) Is Available Now.
Joe is also the founder of The Tilt, a newsletter dedicated to helping content creators find a business model.
The post 10 Ways to Drive Revenue through Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.
Internet Explorer cesserà di esistere nel 2022
Intelligenza Artificiale: La Più Grande Minaccia Di Bitcoin?
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11 ways we’re innovating with AI
AI is integral to so much of the work we do at Google. Fundamental advances in computing are helping us confront some of the greatest challenges of this century, like climate change. Meanwhile, AI is also powering updates across our products, including Search, Maps and Photos — demonstrating how machine learning can improve your life in both big and small ways.
In case you missed it, here are some of the AI-powered updates we announced at Google I/O.
LaMDA is a breakthrough in natural language understanding for dialogue.
Human conversations are surprisingly complex. They’re grounded in concepts we’ve learned throughout our lives; are composed of responses that are both sensible and specific; and unfold in an open-ended manner. LaMDA — short for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications” — is a machine learning model designed for dialogue and built on Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google invented and open-sourced. We think that this early-stage research could unlock more natural ways of interacting with technology and entirely new categories of helpful applications. Learn more about LaMDA.
And MUM, our new AI language model, will eventually help make Google Search a lot smarter.
In 2019 we launched BERT, a Transformer AI model that can better understand the intent behind your Search queries. Multitask Unified Model (MUM), our latest milestone, is 1000x more powerful than BERT. It can learn across 75 languages at once (most AI models train on one language at a time), and it can understand information across text, images, video and more. We’re still in the early days of exploring MUM, but the goal is that one day you’ll be able to type a long, information-dense, and natural sounding query like “I’ve hiked Mt. Adams and now want to hike Mt. Fuji next fall, what should I do differently to prepare?” and more quickly find relevant information you need. Learn more about MUM.
Project Starline will help you feel like you’re there, together.
Imagine looking through a sort of magic window. And through that window, you see another person, life-size, and in three dimensions. You can talk naturally, gesture and make eye contact.
Project Starline is a technology project that combines advances in hardware and software to enable friends, family and co-workers to feel together, even when they’re cities (or countries) apart. To create this experience, we’re applying research in computer vision, machine learning, spatial audio and real-time compression. And we’ve developed a light field display system that creates a sense of volume and depth without needing additional glasses or headsets. It feels like someone is sitting just across from you, like they’re right there. Learn more about Project Starline.
Within a decade, we’ll build the world’s first useful, error-corrected quantum computer. And our new Quantum AI campus is where it’ll happen.
Confronting many of the world’s greatest challenges, from climate change to the next pandemic, will require a new kind of computing. A useful, error-corrected quantum computer will allow us to mirror the complexity of nature, enabling us to develop new materials, better batteries, more effective medicines and more. Our new Quantum AI campus — home to research offices, a fabrication facility, and our first quantum data center — will help us build that computer before the end of the decade. Learn more about our work on the Quantum AI campus.
Maps will help reduce hard-braking moments while you drive.
Soon, Google Maps will use machine learning to reduce your chances of experiencing hard-braking moments — incidents where you slam hard on your brakes, caused by things like sudden traffic jams or confusion about which highway exit to take.
When you get directions in Maps, we calculate your route based on a lot of factors, like how many lanes a road has or how direct the route is. With this update, we’ll also factor in the likelihood of hard-braking. Maps will identify the two fastest route options for you, and then we’ll automatically recommend the one with fewer hard-braking moments (as long as your ETA is roughly the same). We believe these changes have the potential to eliminate over 100 million hard-braking events in routes driven with Google Maps each year. Learn more about our updates to Maps.
Your Memories in Google Photos will become even more personalized.
With Memories, you can already look back on important photos from years past or highlights from the last week. Using machine learning, we’ll soon be able to identify the less-obvious patterns in your photos. Starting later this summer, when we find a set of three or more photos with similarities like shape or color, we’ll highlight these little patterns for you in your Memories. For example, Photos might identify a pattern of your family hanging out on the same couch over the years — something you wouldn’t have ever thought to search for, but that tells a meaningful story about your daily life. Learn more about our updates to Google Photos.
And Cinematic moments will bring your pictures to life.
When you’re trying to get the perfect photo, you usually take the same shot two or three (or 20) times. Using neural networks, we can take two nearly identical images and fill in the gaps by creating new frames in between. This creates vivid, moving images called Cinematic moments.
Producing this effect from scratch would take professional animators hours, but with machine learning we can automatically generate these moments and bring them to your Recent Highlights. Best of all, you don’t need a specific phone; Cinematic moments will come to everyone across Android and iOS. Learn more about Cinematic moments in Google Photos.
Addio Windows 10X: Microsoft lo abbandona
Maysam Moussalem teaches Googlers human-centered AI
Originally, Maysam Moussalem dreamed of being an architect. “When I was 10, I looked up to see the Art Nouveau dome over the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, and I knew I wanted to make things like that,” she says. “Growing up between Austin, Paris, Beirut and Istanbul just fed my love of architecture.” But she found herself often talking to her father, a computer science (CS) professor, about what she wanted in a career. “I always loved art and science and I wanted to explore the intersections between fields. CS felt broader to me, and so I ended up there.”
While in grad school for CS, her advisor encouraged her to apply for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. “Given my lack of publications at the time, I wasn’t sure I should apply,” Maysam remembers. “But my advisor gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received: ‘If you try, you may not get it. But if you don’t try, you definitely won’t get it.’” Maysam received the scholarship, which supported her throughout grad school. “I’ll always be grateful for that advice.”
Today, Maysam works in AI, in Google’s Machine Learning Education division and also as the co-author and editor-in-chief of the People + AI Research (PAIR) Guidebook. She’s hosting a session at Google I/O on “Building trusted AI products” as well, which you can view when it’s live at 9 am PT Thursday, May 20, as a part of Google Design’s I/O Agenda. We recently took some time to talk to Maysam about what landed her at Google, and her path toward responsible innovation.
How would you explain your job to someone who isn’t in tech?
I create different types of training, like workshops and labs for Googlers who work in machine learning and data science. I also help create guidebooks and courses that people who don’t work at Google use.
What’s something you didn’t realize would help you in your career one day?
I didn’t think that knowing seven languages would come in handy for my work here, but it did! When I was working on the externalization of the Machine Learning Crash Course, I was so happy to be able to review modules and glossary entries for the French translation!
How do you apply Google’s AI Principles in your work?
I’m applying the AI Principles whenever I’m helping teams learn best practices for building user-centered products with AI. It’s so gratifying when someone who’s taken one of my classes tells me they had a great experience going through the training, they enjoyed learning something new and they feel ready to apply it in their work. Just like when I was an engineer, anytime someone told me the tool I’d worked on helped them do their job better and addressed their needs, it drove home the fourth AI principle: Being accountable to people. It’s so important to put people first in our work.
This idea was really important when I was working on Google’s People + AI Research (PAIR) Guidebook. I love PAIR’s approach of putting humans at the center of product development. It’s really helpful when people in different roles come together and pool their skills to make better products.
How did you go from being an engineer to doing what you’re doing now?
At Google, it feels like I don’t have to choose between learning and working. There are tech talks every week, plus workshops and codelabs constantly. I’ve loved continuing to learn while working here.
Being raised by two professors also gave me a love of teaching. I wanted to share what I’d learned with others. My current role enables me to do this and use a wider range of my skills.
My background as an engineer gives me a strong understanding of how we build software at Google’s scale. This inspires me to think more about how to bring education into the engineering workflow, rather than forcing people to learn from a disconnected experience.
How can aspiring AI thinkers and future technologists prepare for a career in responsible innovation?
Pick up and exercise a variety of skills! I’m a technical educator, but I’m always happy to pick up new skills that aren’t traditionally specific to my job. For example, I was thinking of a new platform to deliver internal data science training, and I learned how to create a prototype using UX tools so that I could illustrate my ideas really clearly in my proposal. I write, code, teach, design and I’m always interested in learning new techniques from my colleagues in other roles.
And spend time with your audience, the people who will be using your product or the coursework you’re creating or whatever it is you’re working on. When I was an engineer, I’d always look for opportunities to sit with, observe, and talk with the people who were using my team’s products. And I learned so much from this process.
Steady As She Goes: Why Consistency Builds Better Long-Term B2B Marketing
How can B2B marketers build better and more sustainable long-term marketing efforts?
88 percent of global marketers said that achieving brand consistency was crucial, in dentsu international’s recent whitepaper survey, “2021: The year of Brand Consistency, Efficiency and Agility.”
Consistency is an element that’s sometimes overlooked in B2B marketing, however, so we wanted to explore some of the ways that top marketers are incorporating consistency into their efforts.
Let’s get started and dig in with five ways that consistency creates better long-term B2B marketing.
Consistency Case #1 — Content Creation Persistence
For digital futurist and keynote speaker Brian Fanzo, consistency is everything when it comes to successful content creation.
“Consistency. Consistency. Consistency. When it comes to content creation and growing within the #CreatorEconomy, consistency is everything,” Fanzo recently noted.
Beyond content, Fanzo sees consistency as key in many important areas of our professional lives, and one that can also be a personal challenge.
“Consistency is the key to almost every aspect of marketing and entrepreneurship. Consistency is also a massive struggle for those of us with #ADHD,” he shared.
“Surround yourself [with people] who are good at being consistent and empower them by being transparent with your need to be nudged,” Fanzo also suggested.
[bctt tweet=”“Consistency. Consistency. Consistency. When it comes to content creation and growing within the #CreatorEconomy, consistency is everything.” — Brian Fanzo @iSocialFanz” username=”toprank”]Consistency Case #2 — Get Data Strategies on Track
As with content, marketers must also ensure that the ever-growing amount of data we collect is both relevant and consistent.
“The most common reason AI and ML fail in the marketing sector is that there’s little consistency to the data across all campaigns and strategies,” Louis Columbus, principal at Dassault Systèmes, recently observed in “Is poor data quality undermining your marketing AI?”
Indeed, numerous surveys published over the past year indicate that a leading pain point for marketers is data inconsistency. 36 percent of B2B marketers say that having messy data is a top marketing performance measurement challenge, as we shared in the TopRank Marketing weekly B2B marketing news.
[bctt tweet=”“The most common reason AI and ML fail in the marketing sector is that there’s little consistency to the data across all campaigns and strategies.” — Louis Columbus @LouisColumbus” username=”toprank”]Consistency Case #3 — Messaging That’s on the Same Page
Sean Crowley, vice president of portfolio marketing at Dun & Bradstreet, recognizes the importance of delivering consistency in messaging no matter which digital channel is being used.
“When you look at being able to bring people together, it’s about creating a common message, a common purpose, and a common effort with everything that you do and how you go to market,” Crowley told us.
“Ensure that you have consistency of messaging to a target persona and target audience, regardless of what channel they’re choosing to interact with you on,” Crowley added.
Explore more with Sean in our full video interview, “Break Free B2B Marketing: Sean Crowley of Dun & Bradstreet on Cracking the Alignment Code.”
[bctt tweet=”“Ensure that you have consistency of messaging to a target persona and target audience, regardless of what channel they’re choosing to interact with you on.” — Sean Crowley @seantcrowley” username=”toprank”]Consistency Case #4 — Solid Conversion Methodology
For Sky Cassidy, CEO of MountainTop Data, creating repeatable efforts is a key element over time — and one that certain marketers struggle to maintain.
“Some marketers have these flashes of brilliance but they’re not consistent with it, they don’t have a patented, repeatable methodology,” Cassidy noted. “Consistency wins,” he explained recently for MarTech Series.
[bctt tweet=”“Some marketers have these flashes of brilliance but they’re not consistent with it, they don’t have a patented, repeatable methodology. Consistency wins.” — Sky Cassidy @mountaintopdata” username=”toprank”]Consistency Case #5 — Well-Aligned SEO Signals
Aleyda Solis, international SEO consultant and the founder of Orainti, sees consistency as a strength that even smaller brands can use to drive search strategy.
“Despite how competitive some sectors are, there’s still a place for new players that execute fast and consistently a well-aligned SEO strategy,” Solis noted. “The small fast and consistent player will end up eating the big slow and inconsistent one in the long run. The big brand advantage has limits,” Solis explained.
When it comes to building a successful SEO strategy, consistency also plays an important part.
“Identify potential cannibalization issues we might have with many different pages of the same type that could be mapped with the same queries, allowing us to consolidate/clean and better align our Web structure for a more consistent experience and better chances to rank, and give a better experience with our pages,” Solis recently urged, in her “The Keywords Mapping Cheatsheet For Different Types of Sites.”
[bctt tweet=”“The small fast and consistent player will end up eating the big slow and inconsistent one in the long run.” — Aleyda Solis @aleyda” username=”toprank”]Keep Steady On The High Seas of B2B Marketing
Keeping steady even in the high seas frequently encountered in B2B marketing is possible for marketers who implement the ideas and insights outlined here by Brian, Louis, Sean, Sky, and Aleyda.
To learn more about how consistent and always-on efforts can help build successful B2B marketing campaigns, check out these additional resources we’ve published on the subject:
- Inside Influence 2: Garnor Morantes from LinkedIn on the Power of Always-On Influence
- How to Elevate B2B Marketing with Always-On Influence
- Break Free B2B Marketing: Sarah Barnes-Humphrey of Shipz and The Art of Consistent Change
- How To Move From A Pilot B2B Influencer Marketing Program to Always-On Success
- The Content Marketing Juggling Act: How to Consistently Create Quality, Engaging Content
Consistent B2B marketing can take considerable time and effort, which is why many top brands choose to work with an award-winning digital marketing agency like TopRank Marketing. Contact us today and let us know how we can help, as we’ve done for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others.
The post Steady As She Goes: Why Consistency Builds Better Long-Term B2B Marketing appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.
