Let's Get Personal - Thu, May 23 2019

Amazon is working on a voice-activated wearable capable of reading human emotions, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. The e-commerce giant's hardware research and development group Lab126 and the voice software team behind Alexa are collaborating on…

Shel Holtz The health and medical potential is undeniable, but the abuse by marketers is downright creepy. Imagine Alexa saying, unprompted, 'You seem blue. How about a cup of Starbucks coffee to perk you up?'

Smart home assistants need smarter timers. Today, you can use Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri to set timers. You can use all three smart assistants to control your smart home gadgets. But frustratingly, you cannot use the two features together:…

Shel Holtz The author makes an excellent point. Beyond the home, consider the industrial potential of voice commands to set timers for equipment.

Events continue to prop up Facebook's business; they've streamlined ticketing measures to make gathering offline even easier. As Facebook continues its evolution toward connecting communities, streamlining a major element of the Event planning…

Shel Holtz This makes total sense. If you have events and a Facebook account, why wouldn't you take advantage of this?

AI-powered voice assistants from Google, Amazon, Apple, and others could be perpetuating harmful gender biases, according to a recent UN report. The report, titled “I'd blush if I could” — Siri's response to provocative queries…

Shel Holtz While I get the subservient bit, I also think voice assistants are smarter than anybody else in the room; why wouldn't that also affect perceptions? In any case, you can switch to John Legend's voice on Google's voice assistant.

YouTube will no longer publicly display full subscriber counts for channels with 1,000+ subscribers. Starting in August 2019, YouTube will begin showing abbreviated subscriber counts anywhere that a channel's numbers are displayed. This change will…

Shel Holtz Seems like an odd change without a purpose. But, um, okay.

Global drinks giant Coca-Cola has taken an irreverent reference to a dark time in its history in partnership with Netflix. Partnering with the period thriller, Stranger Things, Coca-Cola has reminisced about the launch of ‘New Coke' –…

Shel Holtz I love this. Companies shouldn't be afraid to be self-effacing from time to time.

Consumers are more likely to unlock their smartphones without having a specific app in mind, giving mobile carriers a big opportunity to get their attention with snackable mobile content, per a survey that researcher Phoenix Marketing and mobile ad…

Shel Holtz The challenge here is huge: How do you get people to your content when they open their phones just to kill time?

There was a time, not all that long ago, we had to physically visit a physical store or business to find out about the products or services on offer. To get similar information today, most people type in a product-related query or business name…

Shel Holtz Mobile first. Check. Optimize for voice. Check. SEO still matters and these trends are clearly worth paying attention to.

by Udayan Bose, Op-Ed Contributor, May 20, 2019 On Tuesday, May 14, Google addressed an audience of more than 4,000 top search marketers from 68 countries at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco as Allan Thygesen, President, Americas…

Shel Holtz Marketing's holy grail. If you know the consumer's intent, you can deliver the right message at the right time (and even in the right place).

Thanks to technology, we have a wealth of choices for communicating in the office and beyond. But herein lies the challenge. Email someone when you should have called and you might waste time going back and forth, or they might misunderstand your…

Shel Holtz While this is meant for 1-to-1 communication, the guidance can easily be applied to organizational communication as well.