Earned Media Marketing Roundup

Photo courtesy of Unsplash, taken by Jakob Owens

Happy Friday and welcome to the Earned Media Marketing roundup, my fortnightly speed-read through some articles that anyone in social media, influencer and content marketing might want to check out to keep on top of things. We are all about the world of Earned Media Value here at Soulmates.AI and so I usually read articles with an eye on how we can help people generate EMV instead of relying on traditional paid campaigns.

I might also include the tech-geek things like Artificial intelligence, Blockchain, Neural Nets, Data Science and Real Metrics, Computational Creativity, Gamification, etc. I hope you enjoy the curation and will drop any comments below.

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Influencer Marketing does not need to cost too much. I love the idea of Support-A-Creator mentioned in this article. This project helps creators who support a product a piece of the sales they generate, helping fans feel good about supporting social media creators they like. I’ve seen the positive relationships that so many people create in conversation with creators and this is a way to build those out, which is good feeling that can then extend to the brand. This is also a great way for smaller companies to get into influencer marketing without the increasing costs.

LINK: How Epic is empowering smaller studios to harness influencer marketing | VentureBeat

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We love AI, we love Influencer Marketing and we love blockchain so this story about Patron, the IMS from Japan that is exploding there and expanding elsewhere was bound to show up on this list. They are certainly an interesting solution, making good use of SmartContracts to track payments and work to ensure it gets done. We have often discussed with our partner psyML how blockchain could be an effective way to also keep up on legitimate influencers/creators, root out out the problem of fake followers used to drive up social reach, and even disclosures that will suit the FTC (so you could experience content without intrusive logos, but be able to double-check to see if a post was organic or paid). We just need to get Patron using the EMV Index and then they could help brands and influencers alike see the actual dollar value of the content being created through their partnerships generated from their solution.

LINK: The Influencer Market in Crypto Is Going “Nowhere But Up” Says John McAfee

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While the question in the title of this piece from New York Magazine is broader than it should be since the FTC does regulate some aspects of social media influencer marketing, this New York Magazine article delves into the complexity of this industry and how regulation will be startlingly difficult to construct and maintain. Of course, the challenge of regulation is a potential loss of innovation. Yes, when we see people trying to game the system, no one likes that. But when interesting ideas come up (#10yrschallenge to improve facial recognition, anyone?), do we want to stifle them immediately?

Of course, this is why brands should only work with social media creators who truly love their products and share their values. When true partnerships are formed, some of these elements become less concerning because it is all about working together and growing both the creator’s audience and the brand’s success. That’s what we call Brand Soulmates and once you know you have great collaborators to work with your brands, you can leave it open for them to innovate with how they create content and promote it to the world.

LINK: Is It Time to Regulate Social Media Influencers? — New York Magazine — Medium

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As deep users of Natural Language Processing (NLP), we are always interested in seeing how much better our systems get, especially in the world of social media where we train endlessly. Of course, if it gets too good, this is alarming when we think about how these tools can be used in the creation of fake bot followers and even fake social media influencers that could become advocates for brands. Not everyone will take a recommendation from fake influencers, but there are some out there going on undetected so maybe people will eventually not care too much as long as they’re getting content they enjoy.

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

Our goal is not to replace creative content, of course, it’s to better empower people to make superior creative decisions. We see amazing things advancements in computational creativity like the new ALYSIA app that can help people write lyrics and melodies for their own original songs. For me, this is a triumph of the way that people can come together with AIs. And, as a sufferer of both carpal and cubital tunnel, I can tell you that voice recognition and predictive sentence completion are both helpful to this longtime writer.

I just hope that the machines featured here are only finishing sentences in five years and not beginning them as well.

LINK: Finally, a Machine That Can Finish Your Sentence — The New York Times — Medium

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Thanks for checking in with the Earned Media Value Roundup. More to come next week. If you want to check out the latest EMVI numbers, be sure to check out our ticker, hosted on the best site for marketing news, alistdaily.

Disclosures: Obviously, I work for Soulmates.AI and alistdaily is part of a.network, of which Soulmates.AI is a part. ALYSIA is also owned by friends and my daughter uses the app and has appeared in their videos.