Humans beat the crap out of computers when it comes to understanding language.
Depending on which school of Natural Language Programming (NLP) you have warmed to, machine language can not emulate or mimic human communications. Some say it has to do with extra-lingual communication (eye movement, body language, environmental effects). Others have gone the scientific route and tried old-school ontology and semiotic research. Regardless, it fails. Miserably.
Attempts at NLP (and neural lingustics) assume that language behaves in an orderly, linear and rational way. It's not. It's a mix of notions, nuances and context all orbiting the speaker's intent. The reason computers get caught up and make seemingly irrational choices stems from this linear model. Syntax is only one of the tools of language, but it's the only one computers understand.
It would be impossible to code every line of human expresssion. How would you program a machine to recognize the effect of the speaker leaning forward? Of winking; of raising their eyebrows; of a conspiratorial giggle?
Well, you don't. Not with today's technology and computing capacity. And probably not anytime soon. But would that you could, what, exactly, would be the benefit?
This video kinda proves that point -- and, oddly reminds me of several conversations at a local bar, except he was human and we were drunk:
Airlines and banking were among the first industries to attempt the use of machine language to qualify callers in an attempt to reduce the cost of very heavy customer demand for individualized communication. Like you, I still find myself maniacally yelling “operator” into the mathematical ether. We’re not going to talk about the fury-inducing “logic trees” (“alprimera numero dos por espanol”) that make otherwise civil humans pissed off, roided bulls. And still, they try.
Dragon and Naturally Speaking keep at it with speech recognition programs that produce questionable results at best -- for the wishful who dream of a day when they speak, not type, HAL-like. We all know how that turned out. Sometimes silence is golden and a survivial strategy.
In her inspired blog: through my eyes: my life with cerebral palsy Laura Forde explains the nuances of speech recognition software:
You can always rely on me to find the most salacious example possible. You’re welcome. No prob.
Of course, there are other uses for this technology. Arguably, Google and specific-search sites like Wolfram-Alpha still use the written word with an eye to NLP in order to try to deduce your intent. And things pretty much go swimmingly along. We won’t speak of poor Jeeves at Ask.com who nobly tried come out of the closet. Most of this is just fine academic play since NLP has not really become a primary method of discerning information online.
But it has the potential.
Remember way back when in the early 2000s? Like when you were nine? When you’d often stumble upon a block of text at the end of a web site that listed every permutation of its subject? Remember meta tags that were abandoned by most major search engines?
Those were the first fault lines to appear. The logic goes something like this: if I yell my keyword loudly enough; if I repeat my keyword enough, I will raise my site to the top of search engines’ listings. And it kinda works. Still. The only really effective way to combat that is to spend a ton of cash on AdSense to jump to the front of the line.
Through brute economic force, Target assumes that I’m looking for a house fan that sits in my window versus info on being a fan of house music.
True corporate communications delivers more than eyeballs and keystrokes. It provides depth and context that raw search engine muscle can’t. In fact, I believe the pursuit of being “#1 on Google” is a folly since most people want information, not ranking. Google and others are now well aware of how people are gaming the system and have altered their algorithms to best combat them.
If your true content is written without regard to how it will “SEO,” you will produce a cohesive and well-read piece of communication that delivers quality over quantity.
Recent events have got me thinking about zombies. Actually, I think about zombies a lot. And not the metaphorical ones, either. I might be walking down the street and think, "heh, that looks like a good building to withstand the undead onslaught." Or, "Oh! I so need that water purification system when the Apocalypse comes."
Sure, go ahead and giggle, but you'll be laughing out of the other side of your decomposing mouth when it goes down.
The New Normal: Undead.
I'm not only interested in surviving the Apocalypse intact and as a viable human, but also as an economically thriving businessman. If you're having trouble in this economy, I have news for you: you're a pussy.
Being a MarCom professional, I naturally tend towards continuing that career path thinking that I can offer valuable services during and after the undoing of civilization. See, Marketing Communications and Zombies is the ultimate horizontal market. And a challenging project to manage.
How to Get Heard Over the Screams of Zombies' Needs.
Brand management campaigns are difficult to coordinate in calm markets, like, say, during a small oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. So, companies would need to move quickly and precisely to implement and maintain brand awareness during a market correction where most population centers are considering other priorities.
Your branding campaign would need to take this into account. Many other companies will be interested, but few will survive, phsyically, as humans.
Strategic multichannel branding efforts can make your company's message heard louder than the inevitable, constant and frankly, disturbing din of "brains!" It's important that your message raises your brand to Top of Mind awareness.
Markets, Demographics and Change. And Zombies.
Assuming that your message reinforces your brand, and, of course, that you still have a human staff, your MarCom efforts can begin in earnest to leverage the hard and bloody work you've achieved in your first phase described above. This is where a creative, out-of-box and current marketing communications firm (much like cgkinc.com | corporate communications, if we're still alive - and we hope to be!) can be enormously helpful in navigating the marketplace.
As marketing professionals, we've all been taught how understanding your audience is the first step to any successful marketing plan. In this case, however, it's very smart to understand how your market is changing. Zombies aren't so much of a "market" so much as a slowly evolving "community."
At first, small communities would need very little communications services while the living would need consistent messaging.
As we've seen in many other volatile demographics (vampires, angry extraterrestrials and Tea Baggers), marketers stand to lose big if they can't keep up with the target audience's quick changes and developments.
Shortly after the beginning of the Walking Dead Event, zombies would constitute a phenomenally vast and quickly growing marketplace. The Living, although now a much smaller target market, would be affluent decision-makers who possess strong brand loyalty, disposable income and would most likely be childless. And without pets. Key socio-demographics profiles.
The "DEDu's" demo (Dynamic Entrepreneurial Dead-unfriendly) would become a very lucrative market which would be well served by thoughtful and break-through messaging.
But, Chris, how do you... OH SHIT THEY'RE EATING MY BRAIN!
As stated before, this marketing opportunity is the most interesting horizontal market in existence. But traditional approaches to marketing communications across industries offers guidance. Identifying opportunities is the most effective standard by which you can calculate your client's ROI-RFP-Q ratio.
Take a look at the following industry precis to understand how the brain dead might function as consumers - and how the living might also be consumers of another order:
NEED:
SOLUTION:
Garmin's newly released voice activated GPS. Pre-programmed to each target market, the slim and attractive unit can be tethered around a zombie's neck to serve as a beacon and offer directions to refugee camps using the most reliable route, free of armed militias, armories, prisons, Louisiana entirely and military bases.
Humans can use the unit to build escape routes and store their history in the unit's 2GB memory SDRAM card. The social network feature allows fleeing humans to share routes, techniques, pictures and videos. And make new friends or "like" particular zombies.
NEED:
SOLUTION:
SoyBioProducts® offers both audiences organic, filling and sustainable food. Zombie brands are created the finest stem cells discarded by the US Government and are richly textured in realistic and delicious brain, gut and neck forms, fortified with synthetic blood and other essential bodily fluids.
Humans enjoy several exciting flavors, including trans-fat free Ranch and Kyoto Teriyaki SoyBioProducts® patties, hot dogs and other delectable textured meats, all certified organic and zombie- and stem cell-free.
Many industries can benefit from your marketing communications expertise. Be nimble, look for opportunities and keep your staff on it's toes for their survival/holiday bonus.
Messaging: Nuancing the Living and Not-Living
Understand that your marketing communications is not a broadcast. You will need to tailor your message to each market. Let's look closely at the market segmentation:
Alive or Not?
This can significantly reduce your cross-cultural advertising expenses (there are no hyphenates during the Apocalypse). For example, your wittiest copy writing will fall upon deaf and dead ears to the zombie population. Consider visual communication, primal grunting audio (Pandora, radio) and hunger messages (the local "Eyewitness News").
For the not-undead, graphic and to-the-point messaging ("Your Brains Are Your Own!") would best be delivered as posters and other alternative media channels such as banner ads and very-high-flying poster Cessnas. Other channels that might be considered would be the traditional PSA which would instruct, educate and boost community awareness ("The More You Know: A Shovel Means No!")
This is the 24th installment of cgkinc.com | corporate communications' online lecture series: "What the Fuck Just Came Out of Your Mouth?" offered at Mesa Arizona Community College's (MACC Daddy AZ) privately funded "You Might Be Able To Do It" Lecture Series.
I could have had this entire website written for $27.20. Who's the idiot now, Chris?
I'm not joking. $27. Considering that I've (conservatively) put in about 20 hours of work to research, write, edit, proof and then re-write the text on this site, my hourly wage would be $1.36 per hour.
Let's make it an even $1.40 per hour and call it good.
Let’s get something perfectly clear: content creation is hard, complex work. That huge sucking sound you hear when you open your browser is the need for clear, concise and compelling language. I know that I’ve discussed this in detail on this site, but it’s really getting under my skin.
Copywriters and editors spend years honing their skills which are based on some very expensive education. The voracious need of content makes companies work in counter-intuitive ways. Led by market force instead of forward looking ideas, content-heavy sites find that the only way to sell their goods profitably is to reduce the cost of their content – content that drives sales. I’m not talking about sweaters here but business services that make up the majority of online sales sites. OK, and sweaters, too.
How many times have you seen “comprehensive integrated solutions designed to maximize throughput and lessen click-through-fall-off?” Wha? Fir realz?
Don't offer me $.01 per word. I'm not Charles Dickens.
by Elizabeth M. Young
©Los Angeles Times
"It was inevitable, when Internet content production made profits from advertising, that there would be ways to cheat the system, to draw tremendous numbers of views and to do so with as little real work or quality as possible. This is the way in which "content farms" and news aggregators were born.
Now Google is working on an improvement to its search algorithm that will weaken the ability of content farms to push poor, junk content into the top search results. Content farming is also referred to as the next stage of spam, since true web spam has been decreasing, according to InfoWars.
Content farming often works with unpaid volunteer content producers, borrowed content and even plagiarized content of varying quality. The very big content farms managed to pull in a lot of advertising revenue from millions of pages that were produced for practically nothing. The dubious content winds up in the best position in the search results. This irritates and disappoints the readers.
Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb has been analyzing content farming for a time and has produced some articles about the effects of poor and cheap content that is put up strictly to reap the ad revenue.
Examples of content farms are E-How, wiki-How, DemandMedia and Mahalo.
ed: Aspiring authors and "experts" join the sites and produce content for slave labor wages. Advertising is slapped in and massive amounts of low quality, cheaply produced or borrowed content (bolstered by dubious AdSense campaigns: shame, Google) show up routinely in the top search results.
Answers.com, with 38 million pages, and Demand Media, with about 4,000 pieces per day during 2009 are two more examples of mass production, low quality content farms.
This could mean trouble for content aggregators who collect news and other information, then add in original content to broaden the scope of information, which is an essential service provided by the web.
If there are low levels of original content or evidence that the content was copied, word for word from other sites, then the new algorithm will lower the site's position in the search results.
When there is little or no original content, the act is called "repurposing from other sources". In many cases, the original publisher can benefits from back links that draw more traffic and attention for their original articles. In most cases, however, a trend toward simply copying and pasting content that is already published somewhere else, then getting a higher position on the search results, is entirely unhelpful to the original publisher who ends up losing that traffic.
Another argument against the new Google algorithm is that news aggregation allows readers more freedom to read alternatives s to the way in which the mainstream media approaches a story. In that sense, the change can be viewed as a ploy by the mainstream media to limit the choices that readers can get when they want content. This is important when a reader demands information that reflects a particular point of view or preference or focuses on a specific niche audience.
Whether the content farms and news aggregators are content vampires who simply feed on the work of others and reap the profits, or whether these entities offer freedom from the control and limitations of mainstream media, many average web surfers will be perfectly happy to see more quality show up when searching for information and answers under the Google search engine."
