It's Not a Secret, It's Just Not Your Business

The truth is, I was willing to give up fundamental aspects of my privacy, and to a certain extent, accepted that these social media platforms are monitored by businesses and governments.

The cost of doing business as a digital agency, for me, was well worth the price tag, and am incredibly grateful.

However, I'm fascinated by what we as humans knowingly and consciously choose to give up every day.

Just a single click can impact what notifications pop up on our social media accounts — posts, advertisements, friend suggestions, and more — because of AI products, such as recommendation engines and chatbots. 

In addition, AI technologies, including facial recognition and natural language processing (NLP), are helping companies improve customer service and market their products more effectively.

So in addition to giving up our privacy free of charge, we are allowing businesses to get better at marketing to us. 

Here are 3 ways your social content helps AI progress on a daily basis;

Cropping Images Using Saliency Detection

When we look at an image, our eyes are immediately drawn to one point before we examine the rest of the picture. With the use of eye-tracker technology, which detects the pixels of a photo that people are more inclined to focus on, the saliency of certain image regions can be determined. After acquiring this data, neural networks can be trained to better predict what image components people will pay more attention to, and a photo can be cropped using knowledge distillation techniques. The idea is that auto-cropping of images can be used to help businesses determine what consumers tend to fixate on to post more engaging photos on social media. 

Sentiment Analysis

Ever wonder what happens when you tweet a complaint about your espresso from Starbucks? With the help of sentiment analysis, social media software can detect the negative words in your tweet, enabling Starbucks to understand how a customer feels toward their brand. Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing (NLP) to identify positive and negative words in posts and comments on social media. With this information, businesses can consistently, quickly, and accurately respond to customer complaints.

Streamlining Communication with Chatbots

Too often, waiting for businesses to answer your questions takes up a large chunk of your day. Instead of listening to half an hour of music on hold over the phone or waiting for someone to call you back, many companies are using chatbots. Chatbots are pieces of software that conduct conversations via auditory or textual methods and facilitate communication between consumers and businesses because they are programmed to respond immediately to inquiries, saving time and enhancing overall customer experience, Spotify, Wall Street Journal, and Sephora already communicate with their customers through chatbots on Facebook Messenger.

In fact, as of 2018 Facebook Messenger had 300,000 active chatbots.

So before you share something, no matter the platform, give it a second thought.  

Does your business really need to be their business?

Have questions around AI? Contact [email protected] for a consult.