Tech-savvy retailers and e-commerce e-tailers are incorporating augmented reality technology to enhance the customer experience. Given that61% of consumers prefer stores which provide AR experiences, integrating AR technology is an effective way to improve customer experiences with your brand and turn prospects into customers.
2. Identify and follow up on leads through AI.
AI technology can be used by businesses as an ultra-reliable sales assistant. An AI-enhanced assistant can collect and analyze data about the lead, and it can remind you when to follow up on leads and ensures no vital stones are left unturned. Even better, AI can help you focus on the leads that are more likely to turn into sales and prompt you when you should take specific actions.
One example is Zia, the Zoho Intelligent Assistant built into the Zoho CRM application. Zia can predict which leads are more likely to close, so you can prioritize your sales rep time and better forecast sales.
3. Improve marketing campaigns with augmented reality.
AR can enable businesses to deliver marketing strategies in real time. This means customers can experience your products or services as they are meant to be. In the retail sector, savvy brands are using AR as a powerful form of marketing. Timberland, for example, invested inLemon and Orange’s virtual fitting room technology, to allow customers to ‘try before they buy’ remotely.
spoofing” and is a common, illegal tactic to get people to answer robocalls, which are illegal in the U.S. unless you have asked to be put on a call list.
the power of storytelling. Which allows brands to be more memorable and build more meaningful connections with the audience.
Every business website has an “About” page. Most businesses fill this page with boring stats and statements when they should be using it to tell their story.
According to a case study by HBR, making an emotional connection with your audience is much more important than customer satisfaction.
Getting your customers to share their own stories, also known as brand-driven storytelling, is a powerful approach that can increase your authority and brand awareness at the same time.
Social media platforms are using the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in the lives of their users, experts warn.
atasha Schüll, the author of Addiction by Design, which reported how slot machines and other systems are designed to lock users into a cycle of addiction.
Whether it’s Snapchat streaks, Facebook photo-scrolling, or playing CandyCrush, Schüll explained, you get drawn into “ludic loops” or repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback — and the rewards are just enough to keep you going.
Like gambling, which physically alters the brain’s structure and makes people more susceptible to depression and anxiety, social media use has been linked to depression and its potential to have an adverse psychological impact on users cannot be overlooked or underestimated.
However, the number of monthly active users of Facebook hit 2.13 billion earlier this year, up 14% from a year ago. Despite the furore around its data privacy issues, the social media monolith posted record revenues for the first quarter of 2018, making $11.97bn, up 49% on last year.
The EU’s code of conduct on countering illegal online hate speech was first presented in 2016 and initially had four major internet platforms that participated – Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube. Snapchat is the seventh major IT platform to join the EU’s non-binding ethics regulations to fight illegal online hate speech.
Basically, my response to ed tech is “It depends.” And one key consideration on which it depends is the reason given for supporting it.
ads in education periodicals, booths at conferences, and advocacy organizations are selling not only specific kinds of software but the whole idea that ed tech is de rigueur for any school that doesn’t want to risk being tagged as “twentieth century.”
Other people, particularly politicians, defend technology on the grounds that it will keep our students “competitive in the global economy.” This catch-all justification has been invoked to support other dubious policies, including highly prescriptive, one-size-fits-all national curriculum standards. It’s based on two premises: that decisions about children’s learning should be driven by economic considerations, and that people in other countries should be seen primarily as rivals to be defeated.
But the rationale that I find most disturbing—despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it’s rarely made explicit—is the idea that technology will increase our efficiency…at teaching the same way that children have been taught for a very long time.
a deeper question: “What kinds of learning should be taking place in those schools?” If we favor an approach by which students actively construct meaning, an interactive process that involves a deep understanding of ideas and emerges from the interests and questions of the learners themselves, well, then we’d be open to the kinds of technology that truly support this kind of inquiry. Show me something that helps kids create, design, produce, construct—and I’m on board. Show me something that helps them make things collaboratively (rather than just on their own), and I’m even more interested—although it’s important to keep in mind that meaningful learning never requires technology, so even here we should object whenever we’re told that software (or a device with a screen) is essential.
more worrisome are the variants of ed tech that deal with grades and tests, making them even more destructive than they already are: putting grades online (thereby increasing their salience and their damaging effects), using computers to administer tests and score essays, and setting up “embedded” assessment that’s marketed as “competency-based.”
we shouldn’t confuse personalized learning with personal learning. The first involves adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores, and it requires the purchase of software. The second involves working with each student to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests, and it requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.
a recent review found that studies of tech-based personalized instruction “show mixed results ranging from modest impacts to no impact” – despite the fact that it’s remarkably expensive. In fact, ed tech of various kinds has made headlines lately for reasons that can’t be welcome to its proponents. According to an article in Education Week, “a host of national and regional surveys suggest that teachers are far more likely to use tech to make their own jobs easier and to supplement traditional instructional strategies than to put students in control of their own learning.” Last fall, meanwhile, OECD reportednegative outcomes when students spent a lot of time using computers, while Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes
Ed tech is increasingly making its way even into classrooms for young children. And the federal government is pushing this stuff unreservedly: Check out the U.S. Office of Education Technology’s 2016 plan recommending greater use of “embedded” assessment, which “includes ongoing gathering and sharing of data,” plus, in a development that seems inevitable in retrospect, a tech-based program to foster a “growth mindset” in children. There’s much more in that plan, too—virtually all of it, as blogger Emily Talmage points out, uncannily aligned with the wish list of the Digital Learning Council, a group consisting largely of conservative advocacy groups and foundations, and corporations with a financial interest in promoting ed tech.
Dean Starkman is a fellow at Center for Media, Data and Society and a visiting lecturer at the School of Public Policy at Central European University, Budapest. He and Ben Novak discuss the challenges facing public interest journalism, the transformation of journalism as whole, and where things are going from here.
