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Tag: Facebook

Time to stop pointing fingers at Facebook and take some responsibility ourselves.

As a consultant involved in the digital space for quite some time now, I have carefully observed the evolution of Facebook since its first year of operation. Since that time Mark Zuckerberg has taken the heat on numerous occasions for a variety of privacy-related issues. Remember Facebook Beacon and Facebook Lexicon? What usually follows is a hopeless attempt by some people to start a “delete Facebook” movement instead of taking some time to do a little introspection. 

The news surrounding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica over the past few months has caused quite an uproar. So much so that Zuckerberg himself was summoned to two US congressional hearings and just yesterday, to the much better prepared European Parliament lawmakers to explain what exactly had happened along with the steps Facebook was taking to prevent it from happening again.

Here are some of my general thoughts in no particular order.

The bots are coming! Are you ready?

Last week we held our MARCOM Annual Conference (more on that in a future post) where I moderated a roundtable discussion on bots. I thought I ‘d share a few notes from my handout.

Working Definitions (sometimes used interchangeably)

  • Bot: A piece of software that is designed and created to automate the kinds of tasks we would usually do on our own such as making a reservation, adding an event to your calendar, opening a program or displaying a summary report (e.g. general personal assistant bots such as Siri [Apple], Cortana [Microsoft], Echo [Amazon], Google Assistant [Google])
  • Chatbot: A computer algorithm typically built within a messaging platform that is designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via conversational interfaces (e.g. Hyatt chatbot on Facebook Messenger or H&M chatbot on Kik)

New Facebook Features and Why They Matter

Last week, Facebook held its annual F8 conference where Mark Zuckerberg and team announce Facebook’s latest features and overall strategic focus. What Facebook invests time and resources in tends to set the course for the entire digital ecosystem. The gargantuan social network is about to hit 2 billion monthly users with hundreds of thousands of developers actively creating applications for it. While numerous topics were covered at F8 over the course of two days (videos available here),  here are a few key highlights from my own notes.