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by Michael Stuart

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Younger generations are actually better at telling news from opinion than those over age 50

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According to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center, Americans ages 18–49 were more likely to accurately categorize factual statements as facts and opinion statements as opinions.

 
Among the opinion statements, roughly three-quarters of 18- to 49-year-olds (77%) correctly identified the following opinion statement, one that appeals more to the ideological right – “Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” – compared with about two-thirds of older Americans (65%). And younger Americans were slightly more likely than older adults (82% vs. 78%, respectively) to correctly categorize this opinion statement, one appealing more to the left: “Abortion should be legal in most cases.”
 
This stronger ability to classify statements regardless of their ideological appeal may well be tied to the fact that younger adults – especially Millennials – are less likely to strongly identify with either political party. Younger Americans also are more “digitally savvy” than their elders, a characteristic that is also tied to greater success at classifying news statements. But even when accounting for levels of digital savviness and party affiliation, the differences by age persist: Younger adults are still better than their elders at deciphering factual from opinion news statements. Beyond digital savoriness, the original study found that two other factors have a strong relationship with being able to correctly classify factual and opinion statements: having higher political awareness and more trust in the information from the national news media. Despite the fact that younger adults tend to be less politically aware and trusting of the news media than their elders, they still performed better at this task.
 
 
This corroborates the footnote of a recent American Press Institute study which found that only 43 percent of Americans thought it was easy to distinguish opinion from news on digital news sites and social media.
 
The API researchers found that 52 percent of adults under age 30 said it’s at least somewhat easy to tell them apart on social media, versus 34 percent of adults 60 and older: “The level of ease was about the same for younger adults across all media types.” The study also noted that the young folk were understandably less familiar with print jargon like “op-ed” than the older adults.
 
 
A different recent Pew study found that while 57 percent of American social media users expected the news they encountered there to be “largely inaccurate,” younger social media news consumers were — unsurprisingly — more likely to say social media has “impacted their learning for the better” (48 percent of those age 18 to 29, compared to 28 percent of those age 50 to 64).
Op-eds have been playing a much larger role in the news cycle these days, with Trump’s anonymous underling writing in The New York Times and the president’s error-ridden contribution to USA Today. Instead of fighting with terms that are quickly becoming arcane, there are a few options beyond cheering the fact that rising generations of news consumers understand the newspaper layout.
 
What is Fake News?
Fake news is in the News these days, so what is it? The term is most often used to describe completely fabricated stories, but can also be applied to a broader continuum of news. Many news outlets will exhibit some form of explicit or implicit bias while not falling into the fake news category. Assessing the quality of the content is crucial to understanding whether what you are viewing is true or not. It is up to you to do the legwork to make sure your information is good.
 
  • Fake News: Sources that intentionally fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports.
  • Satire: Sources that use humor, irony, exaggeration, ridicule, and false information to comment on current events.
  • Bias: Sources that come from a particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts.
  • Rumor Mill: Sources that traffic in rumors, gossip, innuendo, and unverified claims.
  • State News: Sources in repressive states operating under government sanction.
  • Junk Science: Sources that promote pseudoscience, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims.
  • Clickbait: A strategically placed hyperlink designed to drive traffic to sources that provide generally credible content, but use exaggerated, misleading, or questionable headlines, social media descriptions, and/or images.
 

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form to assist people in recognizing fake news.
Its main points are:
 
  • Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)
  • Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)
  • Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)
  • Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)
  • Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)
  • Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)
  • Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgement)
  • Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).
 
Read more at https://www.ifla.org/ifla-publications, including the latest IFLA journal, October 2018, is a special about Privacy, https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/hq/publications/ifla-journal/ifla-journal-44-3_2018.pdf
 

Fact-checking The sites below generally review specific news stories and claims.

  • Displays news coverage from “left”, “right”, and “center” sources. Use with caution as the categories are generated by users and reflect public perceptions of each news source rather than any actual bias in the individual articles displayed.
  • A product of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, this site is terrific for checking up on political claims.
  • Fake news database, tasked with “tracking fabricated news created to mislead”
  • The Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact researches the claims of politicians and checks their accuracy.
  • One of the oldest debunking sites on the Internet, Snopes.com focuses on widely circulating urban legends, news stories and memes.
  • Hoax-Slayer specifically focuses on email hoaxes, identity theft scams and spam.
  • Focused primarily on political stories.
 
Watch this video tutorial about how to choose your news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-Y-z6HmRgI
With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart
 
Illustration by Sabrena Khadija used under a Creative Commons license.
 
Curated by Mike Stuart, 1stonline.us
 

Top Content Creators use the title “How a Brand Does Something”

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Top Content Creators often use articles with a title similar to the following template:

How (Brand) Is Doing (Something) to Achieve (Result) to Draw a Bigger Audience 

 
 
 
Why this content model works | (name-jacking)
  • Brand name recognition
    Nielsen wanted to determine why people purchased specific products. What did it find? Brand!

  • Influencer involvement
    These articles are, by definition, exploring how awesome these companies are. They’re literally saying, “If (brand) does it, it must be worth trying.” The brand gets external links, a huge trust boost, and an increased brand awareness it probably doesn’t need (but never hurts).

     

 

5 steps to use this article model

To create your own content using this article model, follow these five steps.

1. Identify an innovative company or thought leader

The most challenging part is determining what business to target. Once you get that down, the rest of the article follows a path set by them, not you.
Here are a few guidelines:
  • Identify a business that doesn’t feel too out of reach. Avoid megabrands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, or Salesforce, as it’ll be tough for your reader to relate to the strategies they’re implementing.
  • Identify a business implementing innovative or interesting strategies. It should be doing something worth writing about. Your article will be harder to write (and less interesting) if you pick a big brand name that isn’t doing something exciting.
  • Target a business doing something interesting related to your business. There’s no point in getting people excited about a strategy that doesn’t relate to your business.

2. Start your research

Explore the company’s sales funnel. Start with the first possible touch-point. Try a search or display advertisement, a blog article, a press release, etc.
As you proceed through the funnel – from ad or article to lead generation to email marketing to sales prompt, take screenshots. Your article will be framed by that funnel.
 

3. Reach out to a representative

You want the company on your side before you publish your insight and observations about what it does. And, if possible, you want information from the company. Try something like this:
Hey [first name of contact],
Hope this finds you well. I am (your name) and was talking to your colleague, (name), and she mentioned you were the one behind (specific strategy you’re writing about). I’d like to congratulate you on putting together one of the most innovative marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen.
Your (specific strategy) would be an awesome topic for an article I would like to write. I would appreciate it if you would have the time for an interview to walk through what you’ve done and inspire other marketers to do something similar. Would you have 15 minutes this week to jump on a call so I can ask you a few questions about the thinking behind the strategy and if it’s performing for you guys?
I look forward to hearing from you!
If they don’t have time for a call, send over a few questions and ask if they have time to respond that way. And if they don’t have time for that, write the article without their involvement, but share the link once it’s done. You’ll still get the bump from a recognizable brand name in your title and the brand will have been made aware your article is being published.
 

4. Go a step above with design

Your article ideally will be at least 2,000 words and broken into several sections. As a result, a table of contents will help readers navigate.
You can format an automated table of contents within your article..
 

5. Promote to specific influencers

If you need help creating an influencer list, use a tool like BuzzSumo.
  • Research the influencers before you reach out to them to better
  • Learn if they are interested in content similar to what you’re doing.
  • Follow them on social media.
  • Then reach out to the influencer and Personalize the outreach.
This is a form of name-jacking!
 
Mike Stuart, 1stonline.us
 
 

Artificial Intelligence For Marketing

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Artificial Intelligence For Marketing

The ways that businesses operate today is not the same as 30 years’ ago. Today, businesses operate based off data-driven reasoning. With that, one of the most effective means to generate revenue growth is through marketing. Now, if a company wants to take their success to new heights, they need to begin using AI for marketing. Here are five reasons behind how AI marketing can transform your marketing efforts.


Artificial intelligence marketing provides a set of tools and techniques that enable behavioral targeting.
  • Behavioral targeting comprises a range of technologies and techniques used by online website brands, publishers and advertisers aimed at increasing the effectiveness of marketing and advertising using user web-browsing behavior information. In particular, “behavioral targeting uses information collected from an individual’s web-browsing behavior (e.g., the pages that they have visited or searched) to select advertisements to display”. This activity extends to behavioral marketing by using that same browsing behavior to prompt relevant email and onsite messaging to users and consumers.
  • When a consumer visits a web site, the pages they visit, the amount of time they view each page, the links they click on, the searches they make, and the things that they interact with, allow sites to collect that data, and other factors, to create a ‘profile’ that links to that visitor’s web browser. As a result, site publishers can use this data to create defined audience segments based upon visitors that have similar profiles.
  • When visitors return to a specific site or a network of sites using the same web browser, those profiles can be used to allow marketers and advertisers to position their online ads and messaging in front of those visitors who exhibit a greater level of interest and intent for the products and services being offered. Behavioral targeting has emerged as one of the main technologies used to increase the efficiency and profits of digital marketing and advertisements, as media providers are able to provide individual users with highly relevant advertisements.
  • On the theory that properly targeted ads and messaging will fetch more consumer interest, publishers can charge a premium for behaviorally targeted ads and marketers can achieve
  • Behavioral marketing can be used on its own or in conjunction with other forms of targeting based on factors like geography, demographics or contextual web page content (list of Facebook’s “Detailed Targeting” options). Many practitioners also refer to this process as “audience targeting”.
Major advantages of Behavioral marketing are that it will help in reaching surfers with affinity, reach surfers that were not exposed to a media campaign, contact surfers close to conversion and in reconnecting with prospects or customers.
Other uses for using AI with Marketing :
Reference Links:

Referral spam is compromising the accuracy of most Google Analytics reports!

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What Google referral spam is, how to identify it in your reports, methods to clean up historical reports and prevent referral spam from effecting reports in the future.

Starting in 2014, there was a full-frontal assault of fake referral spam masquerading as legitimate website visitors compromising the accuracy of our Google Analytics reports!
While we thought Google would fix it, a solution still has not arrived, and so we are on our own.

The problem was, and still is, most marketers don’t know what referral spam is, how to spot it, or how to remove it.

  • This presents a major problem when businesses and marketers begin using these inaccurate Google Analytics reports to make conversion rate optimization decisions on A/B tests, landing page optimization, and more.
  • Worse yet, many marketers are unknowingly presenting traffic numbers to bosses and stakeholders that could be off by up to 60%!
  • There are a few proven strategies to eliminate Google Analytics referral spam.

What Is Referral Spam?

  • The majority of referral spam never actually visits your website which is why some marketers refer to it as “Ghost” spam. Even though this traffic never visits your website it still appears in your reports as legitimate traffic affecting total sessions, bounce rate, time on site, conversion rates and more.
  • On small business websites, this traffic can account for over 60% of daily sessions which causes major problems in month-to-month reporting, A/B testing, or other conversion rate optimization tests.
  • If this traffic never visits your website, why does it show up in Google Analytics?
  • The spammers use a Google developer tool called the Measurement Protocol.
     Among other legitimate uses, this allows developers and businesses to track behavior of their customers from a wide variety of different offline data sources and send that raw data to their Google Analytics account. Unfortunately, this also opens the door for crafty spammers to force raw data into Analytics accounts by randomly attacking UA tracking codes, completely bypassing the website.

referral-spam

How to Identify Referral Spam

  • There are a lot of ways to identify referral spam but the quickest is to review your traffic reports by clicking Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
  • If the referring domain URL isn’t a big enough giveaway of the traffic source being spam, simply visiting the URL should remove all doubt.

How to remove Fake Traffic From Google Analytics?


Three filters will block most future traffic from domains which are currently known to send referral spam.

First filter click the Admin tab, select your Filtered View, click Filters, and enter a name for your filter keeping in mind there will be several.
In the Filter Pattern field, copy and paste the string below:

  • dailyrank|100dollars-seo|semalt|anticrawler|sitevaluation|buttons-for-website|buttons-for-your-website|-musicas*-gratis|best-seo-offer|best-seo-solution|savetubevideo|ranksonic|offers.bycontext|7makemoneyonline|kambasoft|medispainstitute
  • Since there is a character limit to the Filter Pattern field create a second filter: 127.0.0.1|justprofit.xyz|nexus.search-helper.ru|rankings-analytics.com|videos-for-your-business|adviceforum.info|video—production|success-seo|sharemyfile.ru|seo-platform|dbutton.net|wordpress-crew.net|rankscanner|doktoronline.no|o00.in
  • Third Filter: top1-seo-service.com|fast-wordpress-start.com|rankings-analytics.com|uptimebot.net|^scripted.com|uptimechecker.com

The fourth is a Hostname Filter.
  • This can be seen in your Network report by clicking Audience > Technology > Network and selecting the Hostname tab.
  • The Hostname Filter eliminates this spam from your reports by including only the traffic that reaches your website by requesting your actual domain name.
  • The difference here is you must select Include, choose Hostname for the Filter Field and enter your hostname in the Filter Pattern.

How Do I Clean Old Google Analytics Reports?

  • While the above mentioned filters will only fight future referral spam, you can still remove spam from historical reports using a single Custom Segment.
  • Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. Once there, click + Add Segment > + New Segment and recreate the four filters above as a single Custom Segment.
  • Click Conditions, and on the first filter select Hostname > Matches Regex and enter the hostname(s) you used in your fourth filter above.

Click the + Add Filter button.

  • Source > Matches Regex and paste the same list of spam domains from the first filter you created.
  • Click the OR button and repeat this filter two more times with the respective list of spam domains.

Notice the circular graph to the right reflect a smaller amount of traffic. This is the amount of site traffic that remains after all referral spam has been removed. Once you save this filter, you can apply it to any report and any time frame.



THE EASIER ALTERNATE METHOD

Google Analytics spam shows up with bogus referrers, events, and other junk data. Referral spam in web analytics reports has been around for a long time, but it started showing up in Google around the end of 2014. Google is working on the issue and seems to be blocking some of it, but new spam continues to crop up. This method will stop current spammers, and can be re-run again in the future as new spammers arise.

This tool will automatically insert filters to block new referral spam: https://www.quantable.com/ga-filter/spam-filter.php

It uses two different methods in combination:
  • Blocking analytics calls from sites other than your own (or other hosts you select, the tool will walk you through the sites calling your GA). This eliminates most of the so-called “ghost” referrals where your site was never involved in the measurement calls.
  • Explicitly blocking other spammers that get around the hostname-limitation method. Usually these are bots that actually are hitting your site and firing the GA sensor as normal but are still junk traffic that we’d all like to filter out. If you already have existing spam filters these new filters should not conflict with them.


ANOTHER ALTERNATE METHOD WITH MORE OPTIONS

  • This tool lets you automatically create and link referral spam filters to your Google Analytics profiles.
  • The list of spam sources is derived from friends at Lone Goat and Analytics Canvas.
  • To create and link these filters, you will need EDIT access in the Google Analytics accounts you want to modify.
  • This tool will only allow you to access privileged accounts.
  • Note that any existing filters with the names sa_Spam_filter_#N will be updated if there is a mismatch.




Sources:
www.simoahava.com/analytics/spam-filter-insertion-tool
blog.kissmetrics.com/removing-google-analytics-referral-spam
www.quantable.com/analytics/google-analytics-referral-spam-filter-wizard

Dell is winning fans with Influencer Marketing

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Brands’ relationships with influencers are becoming more important, especially on social media.
  • Dell is winning fans by building real hand picked relationships to capitalize on social’s most sought-after leaders
  • Creating longstanding, deep, and mutually-beneficial relationships with social influencers which they manage.
Influencers need to clearly see what kind of relationship it is, and the value they get out of it.
  • “It’s very important to us that these influencers relationships are not founded on a financial basis with Dell.
  • They want to retain the independent and credible voice these influencers have with their audiences.”
  • Dell’s approach is to repay knowledge with knowledge.
  • “Once they established these relationships, they invite influencers to certain events, to briefings with Dell executives, to speaking engagements, or to think tank thought leadership discussions.
Dell even reaches out to these individuals, they do their own due diligence to find out who’s best-suited for specific topics.
  • The main criteria is subject matter expertise, as well as connectivity on social channels.
  • Influencers can be bloggers, or just people who are very active on Twitter or other platforms.
The vetting process is quite stringent
    • don’t rely on platforms that promise to spit out lists by creating profiles based on social analytics algorithms.
Ask: ‘What are you trying to accomplish?’
    • Then we can see if there’s a match, and I can handle the communication and relationship with this influencer for them.
Does it work?
This model has worked fabulously for DELL.
You hear these horror stories of agencies handling company’s influencer relationships: they switch, and suddenly the relationship and all this knowledge about an influencer’s capabilities is all lost. It’s impossible to quickly build trust like that.”

And with that success, there’s a number of real, tangible benefits.

  • “The outcome is third-party engagement and endorsement. Not by feeding our influencers messaging we want them to repeat, but by helping them understand what Dell is doing, and how Dell is well-positioned for our customers’ needs.”
  • Making better use of influencers isn’t just for tech companies. It’s becoming imperative across industries.
  • “In marketing, we’re undergoing a digital transformation. So many things are changing. Online resources are establishing credibility. Look at the gravitas of Wikipedia. There’s a growing trust in specific sources, and a growing ability to discern between fluff and real, important knowledge.”

“Now, influencers are the mega-curators of this good content.”

Tools like Amplified Content Marketing can help put value into the relationships
Influencers in your niche are important for increasing the reach of your content.
  • As guest bloggers to partner-with, link-building from like-minded people,
  • Influencers bring endorsement and trust to your marketing
This is convincing to those in marketing and social channels, but how do you convince executives it needs to be a priority?
  • show that these things are being picked up by the press,
  • positive conversations are being driven online by these influencers,
  • being invited to new industry conferences to keynote case studies
  • is how to show stakeholders that the influencer relations program is working.
This long-term, personal approach to working with influencers has enormous benefits. Once you’re able to show its value, the program is sure to pick up steam, both programmatically as well as organically.
Check out this info-graphic for more highlights on Influencer Marketing
Source: incite-group.com/brand-management/dell-winning-fans-its-long-term-approach-social-influencers