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00petersnyder-blog · 5 years

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Peter Snyder

Dr. Kim Lacey

English 212

15 December 2018

Anthology

In society everyone wants to be noticed. Either for something their good at or just because they are a genuine person trying to make the world a better place in any way they can. Whether it’s by making life easier for the whole or just selecting group of particularly disabled people and making their life so much easier to deal and coop with. While others are scared of what is to come and afraid that our inventions will turn on us and eventually terminate us. Others have fooled people with a CPI person named Lil Miquela so they can have just that much more power and influence in the clothing, beverages, makeup, etc. A robot that looks exactly like a real-life person and she just gained citizenship in Saudi Arabia. With all these different points of views, they differentiate from each-other but still have the same idea, making the best version of humans as we possibly can.

There are two robot or AI giants in society that have making a big splash and have gotten international news attention. Lil Miquela is your typical Instagram model/influencer, she’s got great style accompanied by her lavish lifestyle and her extremely shinny hair. She is best known for her music and her incredibly photoshopped photos giving her an extremely pleasing and displeasing robotic feel to her. Lil Miquela could be a great big PR stunt for the public to be amazed and latch onto therefore giving companies a new crowd to control and influence in any way they want. When tech companies have breakthroughs like for example creating a robot that is self-aware able to think/feel on its own normally that news is shared with the world. The weird part is we never heard a peep until the cyber hack happened, there was world-wide news coverage when everyone thought that computers would turn evil in the 2000s and that the world was going to end in 2012. This makes me believe that there is no robot, no artificial intelligence that sings a loves fashion but merely a very long and well planned out publicity stunt by a music artist who wanted to push the limits and created a CGI of the ideal artist to continue to pursue music and disrupt the music industry. In Sophia’s case, everyone seems to be scared of her because of how far we’ve come from just basic computers. In her article, “Why Sophia the robot is not what is seems”, Caitlin Fitzsimmons says, “In the case of the ABC interview, the questions were sent to Sophia's team ahead of time so they were possibly pre-scripted. Just like an interview with a human celebrity! Note Sophia did not actually answer Virginia Trioli's question about sexism and misogyny in the robot world – the machine deflected and answered a different question and we didn't notice because its answer was even more provocative. Just like an interview with a human politician! A serious answer to Trioli's question is, there's a lot of sexism, racism and other prejudice in AI, because the machines are fed data contaminated by our own biases. Just one recent example: a computer program in the US was more prone to mistakenly labelling black defendants as likely to reoffend – wrongly flagging them at almost twice the rate as white people, according to ProPublica. I requested an interview with Sophia a day or so after the ABC interview but the team had already left the country. I was told there might be a possibility of a Skype interview but there'd be an "operator" for Sophia and also "someone from the team next to her to help with the flow of the conversation". I asked for more information about Sophia's autonomy in the interview but they didn't answer. Perhaps Sophia was too busy being made a Saudi citizen, generating headlines for the opening of a technology conference and plans to spend $500 billion on a city powered by AI. Great PR stunt, shame about the ethics of redefining citizenship.” Sophia is simply a stunt in my opinion as well. If you watch videos on her so doesn’t seem very human in the way she acts and I realize we are only in the beginning of this whole dance but I would need smoother voices responses and not take so long to reply. I think we will eventually achieve a robot that is basically one of us but of different materials and maybe one day we can download our minds and put in into a robot.

There is a company called Psychasec and they apparently have been able to download a human brain’s emotions and conscientious. Psychasec bills itself vaguely as technology that morphs human bodies and promises a way to keep people alive. Two models at the booth show off artificial bodies sculpted to perfect form. The premise is to encourage attendees to sign up for a “sleeve” into which they can transfer their consciousness and upgrade their body. There are also body bags with people inside them. A steady stream of foot traffic has circulated around Psychasec’s booth this week, even though the company isn’t included on CES’ list of exhibitors. The catch: Psychasec is fake, and the booth is a promotion for Netflix’s upcoming sci-fi show Altered Carbon, which begins streaming in February.

Robots will have taken over most jobs within 30 years leaving humanity facing its 'biggest challenge ever' to find meaning in life when work is no longer necessary, according to experts. Professor Moshe Vardi, who is, a professor in computational engineering at Rice University, in the US, claims that many middle-class professionals will be outsources to machines within the next few decades leaving workers with more leisure time than they have ever experienced. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, Prof Moshe said the rise of robots could lead to unemployment rates greater than 50 per cent. "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task," said Vardi. “Robots are doing more and more jobs that people used to do. Pharmacists, prison guards, boning chicken, bartending, more and more jobs we’re able to mechanize them. “I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? The question I want to put forward is, 'Does the technology we are developing ultimately benefit mankind?” Prof. Vardi, said existing robotic and AI technologies were already eliminating a growing number of middle-class jobs and claims that pace of advancement in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing. In December, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore unveiled the most humanlike robot ever created, which will work as a receptionist on campus. With her soft skin and flowing brunette hair, Nadine does not only meet and greet visitors, smile, make eye contact and shake hands, but she can even recognize past guests and spark up conversation based on previous chats. Today Airbus and the Joint Robotics Laboratory at the University of Frankfurt, also announced it was developing humanoid robotic technology to perform difficult tasks in aircraft manufacturing. The company said it would relieve workers of the most dangerous and laborious tasks, allowing them to concentrate on ‘higher value tasks.’ The robots in development can climb ladders and crawl into small spaces and are expected to join the workforce within the next decade. Human mini-brains to speed up Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research are being worked on as well, but Prof Vardi is unconvinced that a workforce of humanlike robots will be good for mankind.

While we may not have mastered collaborating humans with robots, we have made great strides. We have cyborgs in our word as well. Brent Staples has a very good insight on cyborgs and has talked to some high up people in the cyborg world. Staples states, “The mathematician Norbert Wiener founded the science of cybernetics in 1948 with a warning that has become a cornerstone of futurist writing. The computer age was still in its infancy when he cautioned that intelligent machines could wreak havoc on civilization — and perhaps even snuff it out — if we failed to handle them with humility and care. He was not referring to malevolent entities like Skynet, the genocidal artificial intelligence in the “Terminator” films, or the Cylon robots who wage war on their makers in the television series “Battlestar Galactica.” Instead, he posed a scenario in which a relentlessly logical machine brings on catastrophe by obeying instructions containing hidden hazards that its master failed to detect. The machine would complete its work with lightning speed, Wiener said, giving comparatively slow-witted humans no time to appraise the danger and react. Wiener understood that people who owned intelligent or sentient machines would face moral problems similar to those associated with the practice of owning human beings. The futurist writer Philip K. Dick exploited this problem to great effect in his work, most famously in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” the novel that inspired the 1982 film “Blade Runner.” This movie crystallized what futurists like Dick had long seen as the next phase of enslavement. It depicted synthetic beings called replicants, manufactured for use as sex toys, soldiers, assassins and so on. When the replicants take charge of their lives, a bounty hunter tracks them down and “retires” them — which is to say, he shoots them to death. The new HBO series “Westworld,” though based on a 1973 sci-fi thriller about a rebellion of robotic slaves at an amusement park, is closely related to “Blade Runner” in both tone and substance. It acknowledges this debt in a number of ways, not least of all by using the word “retire” to describe the park’s decision to lobotomize a cyborg prostitute who fights back when she is assaulted, despite programming that requires her to submit to rape, strangulation, gunshot wounds and temporary death. Under ordinary circumstances, cyborgs who “die” are surgically repaired, subjected to memory erasure and put back into circulation. The next day, hell begins all over again. “Westworld” has been attacked for sensationalizing violence. But the violence in this series is tame compared with the carnage depicted in any number of video games that show characters being blown to pieces in every frame. Now imagine what gamers decades from now might pay to enter into a world where a quite-nearly-human adversary bleeds, cries and “dies’’ when injured in battle. This is the bloody, morally compromised future that “Westworld” envisions. The father of cybernetics cautioned human beings against the desire to be waited upon by intelligent machines that are equipped to improve their minds over time. “We wish a slave to be intelligent, to be able to assist us in the carrying out of our tasks,” Wiener writes. “However, we also wish him to be subservient.” The obvious problem is that keen intelligence and groveling submission do not go hand in hand.”

In the big picture of things, people are completely terrified of robots taking over, taking our jobs and controlling us. The creators are the bad ones in the situation the robots are only the puppets. These robots are getting international attention and that’s exactly what PR representative from one of the fortune 500 companies. They want to get as many eyes on them at once and then bombard that group of people with ads ways of living telling them to try new GMOs or maybe send your kid to a certain high school or college, suggesting a vacation to one of their resort, etc. I believe there is a higher group of people that control a majority of everything and that’s how all these ideas are connected. Look at driverless cars for example. BMW, GM, and so on are the leaders in that technology because they have all the power in that field. They probably will control when and what comes out as far as cars. Prosthesis are not as extreme as these robots but suggesting cyborgs instead? That seems strange to meet. Get as much of our technology on or in you, in your house and your car so we control if you can walk, control if you leave your house and turn your power so you can’t reach anyone as well. That is a scary thought to think if we get to advanced one day. One person can literally hack the whole system and control everything. I believe that’s why people are always scared of the future because they don’t know if their freedom is guaranteed in the next decade or not.

Work Cited

Staples, Brent. “'Westworld' and the Moral Dilemma of Cyborgs.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Nov. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/westworld-and-the-moral-dilemma-of-cyborgs.html.

Fitzsimmons, Caitlin. “Why Sophia the Robot Is Not What It Seems.” The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 Nov. 2017, www.smh.com.au/opinion/why-sophia-the-robot-is-not-what-it-seems-20171031-gzbi3p.html.

Knapton, Sarah. “Robots Will Take over Most Jobs within 30 Years, Experts Warn.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 13 Feb. 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12155808/Robots-will-take-over-most-jobs-within-30-years-experts-warn.html.

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andreacaskey · 3 years

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Breaking down President Biden’s data-driven social media strategy

Just days before the 2020 Presidential election, we reported that Joe Biden was outperforming Donald Trump on social media by certain key metrics. Despite the penetrating volume of Trump’s Twitter feed, Biden was earning more interactions per tweet, and far more interactions per user.

Not only was Biden winning on Twitter, but his campaign was making an impact on YouTube and even on Twitch. And, of course, he won the election. But this wasn’t a social media campaign based on flair and instinct: it was tightly driven by social analytics. No-one can better explain how that worked in practice than Sarah Galvez, Director of Social Media and Audience Development at Biden for President.

Sarah J. Galvez

“I started out like many millennials as a consumer of the internet and social media,” Galvez told us. “I think I started my Twitter account in a computer lab while I was in high school. I became obsessed with YouTube in particular, and in college started creating content for YouTube for the admissions and communications office — directing, writing and producing — and learned a lot about how to use social media for a specific purpose and goal, which was helping people to understand what it was like to attend an all-women’s college in Massachusetts.”

Dropping everything for Hillary Clinton

Moving to Los Angeles, she started working at Maker Studio, a Disney subsidiary, focused on working with YouTube creators. She helped creators understand back-end analytics, and optimize content based on those analytics. “When Hillary Clinton decided to run for President, I dropped everything to go and work as a field organizer in Iowa or Ohio.” Then she decided to cold-call the campaign, and managed to convince them that it was imperative to have someone focused on audience growth, particularly in the video space.

Read about how engagement trumps headlines.

She was invited to join what turned out to be the first ever audience development team on a political campaign. Since then, she’s cycled back and forth between politics and the private sector, where her clients have included Bloomberg Philanthropies, Planned Parenthood, Hardpin Media, and Harmony Labs. “I’ve also worked at a couple of super-pacs, including the largest Democratic super-pac in the country, Priorities USA Action.”

Re-vamping Biden’s social strategy

She joined the Biden campaign to help it pivot from the primaries to the general election. “I came in, re-vamped the team and the strategy, pulled in a bunch of people from outside of politics — places like Paramount Pictures and ABC, to make a strong team of strategists who were doing organic social content every day.”

It was important, Galvez said, to bring in people who were fresh to the campaign to supplement political operatives who had been through the 2016 cycle, and then the long grind of Trump’s first term. “It allowed us to bring in new ideas, and innovative and creative thinking.” She also broke down responsibilities for social platforms into component parts: for example, treating Instagram stories separately from Instagram.

“The woman we brought in to help us with our video and live strategy was a huge fan of Twitch,” said Galvez, “and started thinking about new and interesting ways to do it — new ways which didn’t always include putting a candidate on there who is a 77-year-old man who wouldn’t authentically be on Twitch.”

Gen Z and millenials, she said, can sniff out inauthentic content very quickly. What’s more, in some cases the platform algorithms are set to surface content which is raw and unpolished.

Biden meets Twitch

“As a result, we had to be conscious that everyone knew who Joe Biden was, and that he probably wouldn’t be scrolling through Twitch on an everyday basis. But you know what Joe Biden really loves? He has always been a huge proponent of Amtrak and infrastructure. There’s a whole community who just watch train streams — cameras on the back of a train, aesthetic and low key.”

Biden was set to undertake a train tour between Ohio and Pennsylvania . The team put a camera on the back of his train, with a soundtrack of lo-fi hip hop music, and streamed it on Twitch: authentic Joe Biden, optimized for the platform. “It’s about mixing the two worlds in a way that makes sense, rather than just trying to force something on the audience.”

In addition, a partnerships team, headed by Christian Tom of Group Nine Media, focused on digital influencers, while a completely separate surrogates team worked with high-level celebrity influences and elected officials.

Driven by the data

We asked Galvez what success metrics she was using to optimize these various initiatives. “The KPI depended on what the actual piece of content was. If it’s a fund-raising tweet, we’re going to optimize to getting donations through the door. But on an everyday basis, we were very focused on shareable content in particular; we knew that if people were sharing it, we were getting that megaphone and amplification, whether it be a re-tweet or a share on Instagram. A campaign is a very hectic environment, and there’s not a lot of time to stop and do a full analytics pull.” For quick daily snapshots of performance, Galvez leaned heavily on Measure Studio.

Galvez had known Measure’s co-founder and COO Thomas Kramer since her days at Maker Studio. “I knew he had a platform which could help us out.” The team was under constant pressure to report on how specific pieces of content were performing, and Galvez didn’t have time to spend an hour or two assembling data.

We asked Kramer about the evolution of Measure Studio. “I started in digital ten years ago, managing paid media campaigns on YouTube, and from there went to Maker Studio where I focused on organic growth for some of the top YouTubers, and then later for those Disney brands which were struggling on YouTube while they were succeeding on other platforms.”

Knowing a content strategy is working

This led to an interest in the challenges growth strategists like Galvez have in working with data. Disparate data across multiple platforms is burdensome to track, and Kramer came across digital publishers, brand marketers, and performance-based marketers like Galvez, who were looking for data solutions that existing social media management platforms were not providing.

“There are a lot of solutions out there for really two things,” said Kramer. “One is social media management in general — your Sprouts and Hootsuites, hyper-focused on how to make publishing and workflow around publishing easy — and the second is social listening tools like Tubular Labs.” These are great tools, said Kramer, but are limited in the information they provide on social content performance.

“A lot of people are focused on whether they did better or worse than a competitor, but a healthier way to look at the growth game, in my opinion, is how do I do a little better than I did last time.” That’s the philosophical underpinning for Measure Studio, said Kramer.

One thing Measure Studio doesn’t do is attempt to combine the metrics from different platforms to provide, for instance, overall engagement scores. “That’s just smoke and mirrors,” said Kramer. “Each of these platforms is unique in the way people consume. The content is unique. The affinities between different content types — like hip hop music on the back of a train — is unique. We focused on bench-marking performance uniquely per format and per platform.” It’s more important to know how to make a successful Instagram story than know how a piece of content performed in aggregate, across platforms.

A large part of Biden’s win

To manage scheduling of content, Galvez’s team used a project management tool, Monday.com. “Particularly towards the end of the campaign, we had days when we were publishing once or twice every hour around the clock,” Galvez said.

“One of the final things I’ll say,” she continued, “is that in 2016 there were a lot of conversations about the tools used on both sides to win it or lose it. For us, what it came down to was not talking about big, fancy tools, but really good content strategists given the exact tools needed to understand what was performing well and what wasn’t.” This time around, the winning combination was: “Good tech, good smart people, a really sound message, and message discipline. This propelled us to great growth and engagement online during the election season, and was a large part of the reason Joe Biden won the Presidency.”

This story first appeared on MarTech Today.

The post Breaking down President Biden’s data-driven social media strategy appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Breaking down President Biden’s data-driven social media strategy published first on https://likesandfollowersclub.weebly.com/

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democratsunited-blog · 6 years

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Harry Reid's 'machine' may help Democrats take the Senate

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=5361

Harry Reid's 'machine' may help Democrats take the Senate

Last month Donald Trump came to Nevada and did what Donald Trump tends to do: He made headlines.

During his remarks at the Republican Party’s state convention in Las Vegas, Trump weighed in on the Senate race between GOP incumbent Dean Heller and Democratic Rep. Jacky Rosen. Heller is the only Republican senator running for another term in a state that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. After vacillating on Obamacare repeal, immigration and even Trump himself, his approval ratings have plummeted 14 points since the start of 2017, falling a full 5 points this year alone; more Nevadans now disapprove than approve of his job performance. So far, all but one poll has shown Rosen in the lead; the most recent, taken in June, gives the Democrat a 4-point edge.

In other words, Heller is in serious trouble — and if he loses, Democrats could seize control of the Senate.

Enter Trump. On stage in Vegas, the president made sure to praise Heller, calling him “rock solid” and “outstanding” (even though Heller declared in 2016 that “I vehemently oppose our nominee” because he “denigrates human beings”). Trump went on to criticize Rosen, claiming that a vote for her would be “a vote for increased taxes, weak borders” and “crime.”

All of which is pretty much par for the presidential course. But then Trump did something that no other commander in chief has done, or would do, on the trail: He called Rosen a childish name.

“I have a great nickname for her,” Trump boasted. “‘Wacky Jacky.’ You don’t want her as your senator.”

And the media, of course, lapped it up, churning out hundreds of stories about Trump’s latest taunt.

Trump with Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev. (Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

Though silly, the spectacle was telling. Republicans have decided that a key way to preserve their narrow Senate majority is by deploying Trump to rally his voters on Heller’s behalf, and on behalf of other vulnerable Republicans. Never mind the president’s historically low approval ratings, both nationally and in Nevada; the important thing, as Josh Holmes, a top political lieutenant to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, recently told the Huffington Post, is that “no one fires up the Republican base like President Trump.”

Or, as Trump put it in Las Vegas, “I’ll be back a lot.”

At the same time, Nevada Democrats have settled on a less top-heavy strategy. The contrast couldn’t be starker. While everyone was distracted by “Wacky Jacky,” state party staffers weren’t trying to come up with insulting nicknames or win national news cycles. Instead, they were doing the same quiet, unglamorous, dogged work that has, over the last dozen years or so, built the Nevada Democratic Party into perhaps the most effective state party organization in the country: They were making calls, knocking on doors, registering new voters and laying the groundwork to turn their people out in November.

If this painstaking plan succeeds, and if Rosen unseats Heller, the Silver State could provide Democrats elsewhere with a practical blueprint for turning resistance into reality in an environment otherwise dominated by Donald Trump. The question is whether the Nevada machine can still power Democrats to victory now that the man it’s informally named after — former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who retired in 2017 — is no longer around to fire them up the way Trump fires up the right.

***

Among politicos, the “Reid Machine” is the stuff of legend. In the 2002 midterms, Nevada Republicans carried all six constitutional offices in Carson City, from governor on down. Two years later, Reid, then the Senate majority whip, won reelection against a weak opponent — yet on the same day Nevada helped propel George W. Bush to a second term in the White House. It was the fourth straight cycle in which Democrats had struggled, and Reid, mulling the results at home in Searchlight, Nev., decided to shake things up.

For years, volunteers had largely run the skeletal organization known as the Nevada Democratic Party. There were no precinct captains and no real voter files. To mobilize rank-and-file Democrats, the party had relied instead on organized labor — and the quadrennial presidential campaigns.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in 2016. (Photo: Sait Serkan Gurbuz/AP)

Reid demanded a new approach. To that end, he recruited Rebecca Lambe, a Missouri-based strategist, to “professionalize” the state party. Lambe started in 2003, but her efforts ramped up after 2004. She hired paid staffers (including a communications director). She cast a wider voter net, targeting the state’s growing Latino and Asian immigrant communities. She built a permanent, web-based voter file. She trained canvassers to upload voter data from the field, via their mobile devices. She emphasized the importance of electing Democrats to local, nonpartisan offices, such as city councils and county commissions. Lambe was also the first to pitch Reid on securing an early presidential caucus for Nevada, and she pushed to hold presidential debates in the state — reforms that eventually helped the party raise millions of dollars and attract thousands of new voters. And later, as Reid’s chief political strategist, she quietly helped steer potential Democratic candidates into specific races and shape their campaign teams.

It didn’t take long for Lambe’s work to pay off. In 2006, Democrats won back four of Nevada’s six constitutional offices. In 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain there by nearly 13 percentage points, while Democrats flipped the Third Congressional District and regained control of the state senate. Most impressive, however, is what happened in 2010 and 2016, two disastrous years for Democrats nationally. In 2010, even as the GOP’s tea party wave flipped six Senate seats and 63 House seats — and even as the final polls showed Republican challenger Sharron Angle leading by nearly 3 percentage points — Reid managed to win reelection by registering thousands of new Latino voters and winning two-thirds of their votes on Election Day. Similarly, in 2016, Democrats banked tens of thousands of early Latino votes and managed to flip the state legislature, elect two new Democrats to Congress, send the first Latina, Catherine Cortez Masto, to the Senate and secure the state for Hillary Clinton as a result — at the same time Trump and the GOP were winning traditionally Democratic territory elsewhere.

Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid address the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Las Vegas, Aug. 4, 2016. (Photo: David Becker/Getty Images)

“We outperformed the national environment by small margins — 1, 2, 3 percentage points,” says Stewart Boss, who served as communications director for the state party in 2016 and now plays the same role on Rosen’s campaign. “That’s what folks in this business call a ‘field margin’ — when the ground game makes the difference in whether you win or lose.”

Lambe and others were instrumental in these success stories. But it was Reid — the machine’s boss, so to speak — who led the charge. Fully aware of his clout in Washington and back home, Reid cultivated the loyalty of the casino industry and the powerful Culinary Workers Union by pushing their favored policies on Capitol Hill and funneling development money to Las Vegas. In 2016, he personally called casino execs and secured paid leave for 300 culinary workers to knock on 350,000 doors, talk to over 75,000 voters, and ultimately deliver 54,000 early votes. For decades, he strengthened his ties to Nevada’s Latino community, which now represents almost 30 percent of the state’s population, by advocating for the DREAM Act and broader immigration reform — a major factor in the huge margins by which Nevada Latinos now routinely favor Democratic candidates. And Reid was also known to steer big donors toward his favored candidates — and to avoid divisive primaries by talking others out of the running.

Cortez Masto, Reid’s handpicked successor, has vowed to raise $1.5 million for the state party this cycle, and she’s already raked in more than a million. But can anyone really replace Reid? The success of Rosen’s campaign — not to mention the larger Democratic campaign to take back the Senate — could turn on the answer to that question.

Rep. Jacky Rosen with, from left, Rep. Dina Titus, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, Las Vegas shooting survivor Jason Sherman and retiring Rep. Ruben Kihuen. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

***

Talk to Nevada Democrats, and they insist that nothing has changed. “The much-vaunted Nevada Democratic machine that Harry Reid was leading — we like to say it’s still humming,” declares Helen Kalla, communications director for the state party.

Election Day is still several months away, but she and other Nevada Democrats can point to some early proof. In 2017 — the first year of the Trump era — the state party heavily invested in flipping a GOP-held seat on the Las Vegas city council, making 12,000 calls, knocking on 8,400 doors, sending 10,000 text messages and mailing more than 10,000 postcards. In the end, the Democratic field operation turned out 622 voters who hadn’t previously voted, according to Kalla — and the Democratic candidate won by 592 votes. That same year, state Democrats partnered with labor, Planned Parenthood and other allies to torpedo partisan recall petitions against three Democratic-aligned state senators that could have shifted the balance of power in the legislature if successful. Efforts to “meet voters where there are,” as Kalla puts it, are continuing apace; a third of the party’s organizing staff speaks Spanish, and a couple of organizers speak Tagalog, the native language of the Filipino immigrants who have flocked to Clark County in recent years. And with anti-Trump activism in full swing, local Democrats seemed to be fired up. In 2016, Kalla says, organizers had to call 108 people, on average, before one person agreed to sign up for a volunteer shift; so far this cycle, someone has been agreeing to volunteer every 20 calls.

Even so, the Reid Machine has been known to sputter when Reid isn’t fully engaged. Critics say that in 2014, for instance, Reid devoted most of his attention to maintaining control of the U.S. Senate — and the result was a Democratic disaster in Nevada, with Republicans gaining a congressional seat and taking complete control of the state government. Meanwhile, the state GOP, long considered the weaker organization, argues that it’s finally getting its act together this cycle, with a helping hand from the Republican National Committee. According to Keelie Broom, the RNC’s Nevada communications director, the national party currently employs two dozen paid staffers across the state; together, they have trained more than 1,600 volunteers, fellows, neighborhood team leaders and core team members to date.

“The RNC has invested more than $250 million in its state-of-the-art data program, and that program serves as a resource to Republican candidates up and down the ticket in Nevada,” adds Broom. “Winning elections takes total teamwork, and the RNC is working hand in glove with the Nevada GOP, our Republican ticket, county committees, Republican clubs, activists and community leaders to identify, register and persuade voters.”

Rep. Jacky Rosen, left, greets Giselle Rodriguez at a Cinco de Mayo festival in North Las Vegas. (Photo: John Locher/AP)

Democrats claim they aren’t concerned about Republicans overtaking them on the ground. The state GOP, says Boss, is “not so sustainable,” because “so much of their budget comes from the RNC, as do their staff and operation.” Nevada Democrats are different, he adds, because they’ve “built a strong and sustainable and independent infrastructure over the course of more than a decade — an infrastructure to support field organizers, data efforts and permanent staffers with donor relationships and political relationships” that remain in place “regardless of what’s going on in Washington, D.C.”

The plan, then, is simple: Register the largest possible pool of potential Democratic voters. Turn out as many of them as you can. Run up the score in Clark County, home to Las Vegas. Fight for every vote in purple Washoe County, home to Reno. And hold the line in the rest of the state, which is largely rural.

In the end, Democrats say, the numbers won’t lie — and they cite this year’s registration data as evidence. When Democrats brought on their first full-time organizers in March, the party’s registration advantage had shrunk (largely due to routine voter-roll attrition) to 59,000 voters — smaller than 62,036-voter margin in 2014, and much smaller than the 88,818-voter edge in 2016. The bigger the gap, the better the chance of Democratic victory; the party’s voters tend not to turn out as consistently as Republicans, especially in a midterm election. Over the next three months, however, as organizers got to work, the Democratic margin grew: first to 61,000 in April, then to 63,000 in May, and finally to nearly 66,000 in June. For three straight months now, Democratic registrations have outpaced Republican registrations.

If Nevada Dems can keep this trend going, they will have a chance to prove in November that the Reid Machine can still win elections — even without Reid at the wheel.

_____

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samuelpboswell · 6 years

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CMWorld Interview: Thinking Inside the (Answer) Box with Courtney Cox

In a digital marketing career that has spanned numerous roles, often with a heavy focus on SEO, Courtney Cox has watched plenty of trends come and go.

But like many of us, she’s convinced that answer boxes (or “featured snippets,” or “position zero,” as you will) hold the key to search success going forward.

Not only do these “best answer” results attain prime visibility on SERPs, but as voice search continues to grow more prominent, they are likely to become the only result for many user queries within a few years.

Recognizing the magnitude of this topic, Cox will dedicate her session at Content Marketing World to Position 0: Optimizing Your Content to Rank in Google’s Answer Boxes. Drawing from her experience at Children’s Health, where she’s tasked with helping modernize the digital experience in an industry that has been — by her own admission — a little behind the curve, she’ll offer up practical advice for claiming this crucial real estate.

As we eagerly await her afternoon session on September 5th in Cleveland, OH, we had a chance to ask Cox about some pertinent matters relating to her specialization. Here’s what she had to say about data-driven conversion rate optimization, strategizing through competitive analysis, speaking the language of coding as marketers, and more.

What does your role as Digital Marketing Manager at Children’s Health entail? What are your main areas of focus and key priorities?

I have a team of strategists and editors that manages the online experience for our patient families. This includes everything from the user experience of Childrens.com, SEO, paid search, and management of our local listings across the web.

We are currently in a major transition period. Our goal is to provide the best online experience of any pediatric healthcare system in the country. Healthcare as an industry is behind the times, and historically, we have been no exception. As the cost of healthcare goes up, our consumers place more scrutiny on the total value of their experience with our system.

We typically think of that experience beginning when patient families walk through our doors; however, the initial patient experience frequently begins online with a search and ends online with a review. It’s our job to use the digital experience to show the value of our clinical services, reduce the anxiety of our patient families, and provide them with the information they need to make the right decisions for their child.

This year, that means implementing rigorous user testing, redesigning nearly every template on Childrens.com, taking advantage of advanced search tactics such as structured data and accelerated mobile pages, and publishing reviews directly on our website.

What is one thing that most company websites could be doing better when it comes to driving sales and conversions?

Fair warning – I’m going to try not to get on my soapbox about this one, but it’s hard because I feel so passionately about it.

Digital marketers need to abandon the “gut feeling” approach to conversion rate optimization. In the days of expensive usability labs and split-testing software, businesses with limited budgets could be excused from making data-driven, customer-centered optimizations. Those days are over.

If you want to outperform your competitors, you must start listening to your customers and responding to their behavior. If you’re not using free tools like Google Optimize for split testing or one of the infinite number of inexpensive user testing options available, then I guarantee you are failing your customers in some way in which you’re currently unaware.

Digital marketers need to abandon the “gut feeling” approach to conversion rate optimization. @CourtEWakefield #CMWorld Click To Tweet

Moving on to your subject of focus at CMWorld: Aside from the obvious placement benefits, why is it so important to aim for ‘Position 0’ on Google search results?

‘Position 0’ results (aka ‘Featured Snippets’, aka ‘Answer Boxes’) are important for a number of reasons. As you mentioned, prominence at the top of the search engine results page positions your website for more engagement and clicks than a lower position, but that’s not all.

Voice platforms like Google Home rely heavily on the position 0 results to give answers to voice queries from their users. For example, if you ask Google Home, “why can’t my kid sleep?” you’ll get an excerpt from Childrens.com that shows in the Google answer box for the same query on Google.

It’s been predicted that by 2020, half of all searches will be done through voice, and most of those searches will be headless (on a screenless device like Amazon Alexa or Google Home). In those cases, position 0 is the only result. You want to own that space.

How can competitive analysis improve our efforts to land an Answer Box?

The best thing to start with is to take inventory of the websites populating the answer boxes for queries you want to dominate. Then go look at what they’re doing on their pages. Are they using natural language in their headlines? Do they have structured data? What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? Is there a theme across all the sites that you can mimic?

Then, you’ll want to match what they’re doing right and take advantage where they’re failing. In my experience, most websites are not well-optimized for the answer boxes, and they’re ranking through dumb luck. A little effort goes a long way.

In my experience, most websites are not well-optimized for the answer boxes, and they’re ranking through dumb luck. @CourtEWakefield #CMWorld Click To Tweet

When it comes to working toward Position 0, which optimization techniques pay dividends above and beyond the SEO impact?

Any time that you invest significant effort into providing quality content that answers your visitors’ questions in a well laid out and easy-to-digest format, you’re going to start seeing payoffs beyond rankings. I think most content marketing folks understand that.

To ensure our content is high quality and highly relevant to what our customers need, we’ve been using a new technique that starts with the “People Also Ask” questions on Google. Basically, we type in a query we want to rank for, take inventory of the “People Also Ask” questions that appear for that query, and answer those questions directly in our content with the question itself as an H2 on the page.

Google is giving us a gift; by revealing these questions to us, they give us a deeper look than ever into the aggregation and relation of their search data. We’d be foolish not to utilize this data to create the most relevant content for users and position ourselves as a valuable thought leader.

Any time that you invest significant effort into providing quality content that answers your visitors’ questions, you’re going to start seeing payoffs beyond rankings. @CourtEWakefield #CMWorld Click To Tweet

What does the emergence of the Answer Box tell us about how search engines are changing to serve the user experience? What do you foresee as the possible next step in that direction?

The demands on our time are greater every day, and folks’ attention spans are ever shorter. We want answers, and we want them now. Answer boxes are just a response to that.

I won’t be surprised if five or 10 years from now, Google has enough functionality and feature sets that the majority of small businesses won’t need their own websites. You’ve already seen less reliance on individual ecommerce sites with the emergence of Amazon and even Etsy. Google could make this possible for service-based businesses like barber shops and coffee shops.

People get kind of anxious about that, especially those in the web development business, but the commoditization of the web has always been a reality. Those of us in digital marketing must adapt or die. And, on the client side, if Google is sending the business, why wouldn’t you want to reduce the cost of doing business by eliminating web hosting fees?

How can content marketers work more smoothly and seamlessly with development teams to get things done efficiently? Where do you see the most common snags?

I’m so lucky at Children’s because we have a marketing technology team that sits with us, and they are some of the most talented and easy-to-work with folks I’ve known in my career.

But I know not everyone has that luxury. I think the thing that has helped me most in my career is that I’ve also been a developer. While not every content marketer can go out there and learn a coding language, they should really try to learn as much about that world as they can. It helps when you’re requesting the implementation of structured data or Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) that you understand the complexities or at least how much work it will take.

In my experience, developers really appreciate it when you consult with them about a request. “Have you heard about AMP? What do you think about it? I think it could really improve mobile traffic – does it have any downsides from your perspective?” That consultation goes a long way for buy in down the road.

While not every content marketer can go out there and learn a coding language, they should really try to learn as much about that world as they can. @CourtEWakefield #CMWorld Click To Tweet

Which speaker presentations are you looking forward to most at Content Marketing World 2018?

You mean besides Tina Fey?

I’m a real tech geek, so the “How to Use Artificial Intelligence to Build and Optimize Content” and “Let’s Chat: How Messaging Apps, Chatbots, and Voice Assistants Will Impact Your Business in the Next 3-5 Years” have really piqued my interest. These are the things I hope we can get ahead of the game on to become healthcare digital marketing leaders.

Unpack More Answers

We thank Courtney for her great answers, which were extremely enlightening even if they didn’t come in a box.

For more expert insights on all of your most pressing questions, dive into the Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing below!

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The post CMWorld Interview: Thinking Inside the (Answer) Box with Courtney Cox appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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