Tag: social media platforms

Over the last few months, I have found it increasingly difficult to verify information. The Tembisa 10, the story of the alleged decuplet birth is case in point. It was accepted as fact and reported around the world. But it was fiction and rightfully condemned by the South African Editors Forum (SANEF).

Consumer behaviour is ever-changing, but several changes we’ve recently seen have and will alter the way brands do business and approach advertising. For one, consumers now have very high expectations for brands, especially when it comes to social, environmental and political issues.

Think the chat you’ve had with a group of colleagues is a secret and won’t cost you your job and reputation? Think again… Nobody could have predicted that the arrival of social media on the business and social scene more than ten years ago could lose people jobs, reputations and careers. But it has.

Modern enterprises are increasingly leveraging big data to achieve faster and better business decision making power, and as well as to gain useful insights that can drive efficiency and improve the overall customer journey. Big data is essentially a combination of structured and unstructured data that is huge in volume and grows exponentially with time.

The considerable diversion of consumers from shopping malls to online trading platforms, further driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, presents huge challenges to authorities in stopping unlawful goods from being distributed. Amazon took welcome initiative last year when they filed two separate joint US law suits with Valentino and KF Beauty against 4 companies and 16 individuals for selling counterfeit versions of the last mentioned copied products on Amazon’s market place website.

Over the past five years, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in marketing have come a long way. Yet many marketers who are using today’s programmatic and social platforms to reach their audience are not exploiting the full power of the algorithms these platforms can offer or the vast amounts of consumer data they collect.

A free press or media has an important role to play in democracies as it is responsible for gathering and distributing the information that citizens use to decide how they are going to vote. They then have the further responsibility to monitor and hold those in power accountable.

For most brands and marketers, keeping ahead of an ever-evolving digital privacy landscape is a major challenge. Not only are governments and regulators constantly amending data protection laws, but digital platform companies also often change their rules to offer consumers better control over their data or, in a more cynical view, to tighten their control over the consumer data they hold within their walled gardens.

When retail investors grouped on Reddit, a social media platform, to buy shares in a number of heavily shorted firms last month, commentators inferred that investors can move markets through online trading. The episode cost short-selling hedge funds millions. It also triggered questions about equity market valuations and whether central banks have been too generous in their pandemic responses.

2020 has been a watershed year for many brands, forcing them to embrace the power of pivoting and quick adaptation. Not doing so was a risk not worth taking. While it presented challenges, 2020 shaped and solidified new forms of communication that brands must be cognisant of, leading into 2021.