Listen
How Technology Tests Our Trust
Today’s Listen is one of the most interesting podcasts we’ve tuned in to recently—and we’re not just saying that because it isn’t about social media strategy for once. It also helps that the guest on this episode of the Harvard Business Review is a brilliant Brit.
Rachel Botsman, author of Who Can You Trust, talks about how trust works in relation to robots, companies, or other people, and how technology speeds up the formation of trust.
“But when it comes to making those decisions, we shouldn’t leave our devices to their own devices.” (Harvard Business Review’s got jokes.)
There are so many good points in here, starting around 01:45:
- (02:35) The lopsided trade-off that occurs when we give our trust to devices
- (03:12) Rachel’s pseudo-experiment between Amazon’s Alexa and her 3 year-old daughter
- (4:20) Why so many of these assistants are given female voices
- (5:05) MIT study about driverless cars and gender roles, and what happened when a driverless car was given a male voice
- (05:15) Why technology is accelerating the formation of trust
- (06:10) Efficiency as the “enemy of trust”
- (06:55) The 4 traits that make someone trustworthy (Competence, reliability, integrity, and benevolence)
- (08:08) How technology helps or hinders this kind of trust development
- (08:10) “Is technology making smarter decisions about who to trust, or is it encouraging us to place our trust in the wrong people in the wrong places?” (Rachel thinks it’s a bit of both)
- (09:48) Trust signals and why it’s so easy to tune into the wrong ones
- (11:05) Rachel’s wild story about her childhood nanny… Wild, we say!
- (11:15) Why it’s so vital for babysitting platforms like UrbanSitter to use machine learning for trust development
- (12:25) Why “How do we rebuild trust?” and “How do we gain more trust?” are terrible questions to ask
- (14:18) How companies trying to become more trustworthy also put themselves at greater risk
- (14:25) The “trust hierarchy of needs”
- (15:00) Why transparency and trust are not synonymous
- (15:35) Why transparency should not be the goal of your organization
Read
5 Key SEO Concepts You Need to Know in 2018
SE-YOOoooo, it’s almost 2018. How was that for a segway?
Maybe we should have led with how Alexa plays a role in today’s Read, as well. It’s true. One of the trends you need to really understand next year is virtual assistance and voice search.
Less Google algorithm updates in 2017 meant a bigger focus on creating The Best user experience possible. That’s where machine learning, mobile optimization and virtual assistance lend a technological hand, and they’re not letting go anytime soon.
All right, let’s get to the meat of these concepts and trends:
Mobile-First Indexing — Yeah, we’re telling you to optimize your mobile SEO again. But! Your ranking signals don’t even come from the desktop version of your site; instead, they come from the mobile version. So, it’s absolutely crucial.
The article details several practical ways to improve your mobile SEO, including taking the Mobile-Friendly Test, compressing any uncompressed images, and removing unplayable content and blocked resources.
Semantic Search — The goal of semantic search is for search engines to understand natural language queries better. Say a user asks Google “what’s it rated?” and they’re standing in front of a French bistro. Ideally, Google would be able to know that in this context “it” refers to the bistro.
What that means for you: a page with one specific, in-depth topic will usually rank better than dozens of pages built around different keywords. Clearly, one comprehensive resource is better at giving Google all the context it needs for the searcher’s intent.
Virtual Assistance & Voice Searches — Google reports that 55% of teens and 40% of adults use voice search every day. (Which sounds crazy because iPhone microphones never get it right.) The rise in voice searches and virtual assistance ties back into the prevalence of mobile devices and people’s need for quick answers on the go.
The post outlines ways to optimize your content for voice search, such as claiming your Google My Business listing, prioritizing long-tail keywords, and optimizing for natural language queries.
“Gimme, gimme more” →
Watch
Gif Me Baby One More Time
After those long summaries, were keeping it brief here. Fitting for animated images on an infinite loop.
GIPHY recently released a list of the top 10 most popular gifs of 2017, and that is one listicle we can get behind. Number 1 clocks in at 340 million views. It’s also interesting to see the range of emotions in this list, from love to disbelief to straight up weird.
Not gonna lie, we haven’t even seen some of these gifs before, begging the question: where have we been?!
Hey, Look at This
Would you like to play a game? No, for real! SEMRush created a Christmas SEO game to teach you a little bit about SEO and get you into the holiday spirit. It’s not procrastination if you’re learning, right?
