Business Communications

Is automated copywriting the next big innovation in email?

Phillip Nones Business, Content Creation and Content Management , , , , , , , ,

Perhaps — with some caveats.

Considering the rapid pace of innovation in communications broadly, the email sector has remained surprisingly little-altered over the past 25 years.  But maybe that’s about to change.

We’re now seeing developers building tools that can create email copy using text-generation technology.  This past June, artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI unveiled a language model known as GPT-3, which has quickly led to several automated writing tools being developed.

Just what is GPT-3?  Here’s a definition according to The Great Book of Wikipedia:

“Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It is the third-generation language prediction model in the GPT-n series created by OpenAI, a for-profit San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory.”

In a nutshell, automated writing tools built on GPT-3 send bits of keyword text provided by an author – otherwise known as “prompts – to OpenAI’s cloud service, which instantaneously sends back full-flowing text that’s deemed appropriate and accurate based on the statistical patterns it recognizes in the online text.

Even though GPT-3 technology accesses a vast information bank of training data comprising nearly 500 billion tokens in cyberspace to “derive” the copy, there’s always the possibility that the results could end up like the early attempts at automated language translation at the start of the 21st century – garbled and awkward.  However, with more AI “practice” and crowdsourced feedback, we’ve seen an established service like Google Translate deliver excellent translations for most commonly used languages like German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. 

Languages such as Hungarian, Turkish and Lithuanian are another matter – presumably with more seasoning needed to get those more esoteric tongues in ship-shape for AI translation.

Facebook, which has developed its own “walled garden” automated translation app, appears to be lagging Google considerably in the quality of its output – even when working in the most common languages like translating from French to English.

For now, the most practical applications of the GPT-3 language model look to be in the realm of business email writing, rather than for long-form business thought-pieces or most forms of creative writing.  In email communications, the author can jot down three or four key points and let the writing application do the rest. In this manner, instead of having to craft a memo completely from scratch, authors can provide key snippets — then take a moment or two to edit the proffered text before sending the email on to its intended recipients.

For those of us who write for a living, such a procedure might not seem particularly attractive. But for the many people who dislike the task of writing business communications — or find it laborious and too time-consuming — the new AI-powered writing may well be a welcome tool.

OpenAI’s automated writing service is on the pricey side today, but we can expect that it won’t take long before costs borne by end-users start to drop precipitously — no doubt due to the proliferation of free services subsidized by the same monetization model that now supports Google Maps and Google Translate.   

And this brings up a question that people should start to think about sooner rather than later:  Who will own the copyrights to the automated texts generated in this manner? 

For the many people who will undoubtedly choose to use freeware, the freeware’s terms of use may explicitly override the provisions of most copyright laws that vest ownership with the party who hires the ghostwriter.  In other words, if someone wishes to keep the copyright, then he or she has to pay for the writing service; otherwise, the service retains the copyright.

It’s only a matter of time before the leading purveyors seek to leverage their ownership of the freeware and the licenses they grant to use it – thereby giving them the ability to promote or censor whatever information they please.

The social acceptability of this medium could also be eroded when the volume of ghostwritten email masquerading as personalized communications begins to overwhelm people’s inboxes. At some point, email recipients will come to realize that any message that doesn’t include a disclaimer such as “I am the author; please disregard all spelling and/or grammatical errors,” can be marked as spam and routed automatically to the recipient’s junk email folder.  In such an environment where we’ll have a perceived quality demarcation between “real” and “manufactured” writing, we may find ourselves in the same place as we are today with tweets — that is, weighing if they are the work of humans or bots and judging their worth accordingly.

In other words, the new “next thing” in email communications won’t be happening without its share of issues and controversies – along with more than a little disruption.  It will be quite interesting to see how it all unfolds in the coming years.

What are your thoughts on the role of AI in writing?  Is the technology poised to become mainstream quickly, or will it remain more of a curiosity for a good while longer?  Please share your thoughts with other readers.

“Wake me when it’s over”: Corporate podcasting goes over like a zinc zeppelin with employee audiences.

Phillip Nones Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Creative and Production, Employment, Human Resources, Media, Publishing , , , , , ,

Just because podcasts have become a popular means of communication in a broader sense doesn’t mean that they’re the slam-dunk tactic to successfully achieve every kind of communications objective. Still, that’s what an increasing number of large corporations have decided to do.

And yet … an article by writers Austen Hufford and Patrick McGroarty that appeared last week in The Wall Street Journal paints a picture of what many of us have suspected all along about podcasts that are produced by corporations for their employees and other “stakeholders.”

These self-important testaments to “corporate whatever” have as much impact as the printed memos of yore – you know, the ones with sky-high BS-meter ratings – had.

Which is to say … not much.

Invariably, podcast topics are ones which next to no one in the employee trenches cares anything about. As a result, corporate podcast open stats are abysmal – running between 10% and 15% if they’re lucky.

And the paltry open rates alone don’t tell the entire story. How many people are tuning them out after just a minute or two of listening, once it becomes clear that it’s yet another yawner of a topic that senior leadership deems “important” and that corporate communications departments try mightily but unsuccessfully to bring alive.

More often than not, the production values of these corporate podcasts have all the pizzazz of a cold mashed potato sandwich. Consider this breathless declaration by PR director Lindsay Colker in a December 18th Netflix podcast:

“I think that Netflix has taught me so much more than information about a job. The person that I was, coming into Netflix, is an entirely different person than the person I am now.”

This response, posted by a Netflix employee on the Apple iTunes store site, is all-too-predictable:

“Hard to follow, boring and dry hosts, and tooooo long.”

Or this recent American Airlines podcast that covered the company’s three major strategic objectives for 2019. After company president Robert Isom described the strategies for the podcast audience, host Ron DeFeo, an American Airlines communications vice president exclaimed, “That’s awesome!”

Employee reaction was far different. Here’s one response from an American Airlines pilot:

“How about you tell me why I should listen to this? A healthy employee doesn’t live and breathe their job 24/7, and the last thing they’re going to do after being on a plane for 12 hours is listen to a podcast.”

Ouch.

Perhaps because of this kind employee pushback, one company, Huntington Ingalls Industries, permits its workers to count the time they spend listening to the company’s podcast on their time sheets.

One suspects that absolutely every HII employee is posting 15 minutes on their timesheets each time a podcast is released – whether or not they’re actually listening to it. (That may also explain why each HII podcast is strictly limited to just 15 minutes in length …)

Every company interviewed by the writers of The Wall Street Journal story admitted that engagement levels with their corporate podcasts are disappointing.  PPG Industries’ response is illustrative.  With only a few hundred listeners tuning in each month out of a total employee base of more than 47,000 workers, “We have a ways to go,” admits Mark Silvey, PPG’s director of corporate communications.

What do you think? Will corporations find themselves riding a wave of success with their podcasting?  Or are they swimming upstream against the triple currents of apathy, ennui, and snark? Will corporate podcasting become tomorrow’s “obvious tactic” or end up being yesterday’s “glorious failure”? Feel free to share your perspectives with other readers.

Email: Nearly five decades old and still going strong.

Phillip Nones Business , , ,

It seems almost unbelievable that the first e-mail was sent nearly 50 years ago. That makes e-mail older than the majority of the people who live in the United States.

But in another sense, e-mail seems timeless. That’s underscored in the results from Adobe’s latest Consumer E-Mail Survey Report, released this past month.

One of the key findings from that survey is that ~85% of the respondents see their use of e-mail increasing or staying the same over the next two years.

Even many Gen Z respondents – people in their 20s – see their use of e-mail in similar terms; ~41% of them predict that their use of e-mail at work will increase, and ~30% see the same happening in their personal e-mail use.

In the work environment, e-mail has solidified itself as the preferred method of communication for many of the activities of daily interaction. When compared against other methods of communication like phone, face-to-face interaction, instant messaging, video chat, file sharing and enterprise social networks, e-mail comes out on top in many instances:

  • Communicating status updates on a project: ~60% prefer e-mail, followed by phone (~16%)
  • Delivering feedback: ~52% prefer e-mail, followed by phone (~30%)
  • Getting a brief question answered: ~35% prefer e-mail, followed by face-to-face (~25%)

And yet … there are a number of tasks where a face-to-face conversation is more preferred as a communications method:

  • Suggesting a new approach or idea
  • Asking for help on a big project
  • Alerting your manager or boss of an important issue

But without a doubt, “quitting your job” is where more than three-fourths of respondents consider a face-to-face communication as the most appropriate method, compared to just 11% who consider e-mail to be appropriate for communicating that kind of news.

These characteristics serve to illustrate that e-mail’s big power is in its efficiency and effectiveness for facilitating more “transactional” communications. But for topics and tasks that require more social finesse – like asking for help, pitching a new idea, or discussing problems – face-to-face interaction still rules the day.

This explains e-mail’s ubiquity and its staying power. It’s quite elegant, really; tt does what it needs to do – communicating quickly and efficiency without unnecessary complications.

  • E-mail enables both send and receive to communicate on their respective timelines, without disruption.
  • It provides an archival record of communication (just ask Wikileaks).
  • It’s fully integrated into people’s work flows.

This last point helps explain why so many “alternative” communication methods fail to catch on in a major way. The next time you hear of some start-up enterprise promising to abolish the inbox, take it with a big grain of salt.

History and logic would suggest that something, someday would overtake e-mail and make it obsolete. After all, in the 50 years since e-mail has been with us, we’ve see all sorts of other communications tools lose their luster – think VCRs, FAX machines, tape decks, QR codes, and information on CD-ROM.

But e-mail may be the exception. It’s pretty amazing how something that’s changed so little over the decades is still such an integral part of our communications.

More findings from the 2017 Adobe survey are summarized here.

This email signature block says it all …

Phillip Nones Business, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Sales, Social Commentary, Social Media , , , , , ,

signature areaOver the years, I’ve noticed how signature blocks at the bottom of business e-mails have been getting longer and more elaborate.

Remember the days of simply showing an office address, phone, FAX and e-mail? That disappeared a long time ago.

Why it’s happened is all a function of the many ways people can and do choose to communicate today.

For folks in the marketing and sales field, sometimes the contact options go overboard. Not long ago, I received an e-mail pertaining to a business service pitch. Here’s what the sender had included in the signature area at the bottom of his e-mail message:

  • If you’re a phone person, here’s my mobile number:
  • If you’re a text person, send a message to my cell:
  • If you’re an email person, here’s my address:
  • If you’re an instant message person, here’s my Google ID:
  • If you’re a Skype person, here’s my handle:
  • If you’re a Twitter person, here’s my username:
  • If you’re a Facebook person, here’s my page:
  • If you’re a face-to-face person, here’s my office location:

The only thing missing was Pinterest, and a FAX number …

Seeing this signature block was a stark reminder of the myriad ways people are connecting with their business and personal contacts.

Nothing new in that, of course — but seeing it presented in one big bundle really drove the point home.

Scott Ginsberg
Scott Ginsberg

Later, I discovered that this litany of contact options was first popularized four or five years ago by the business author and blogger Scott Ginsberg. Evidently, others have now picked up and run with the same concept.

Taken together, it’s no wonder people feel busier today than ever before, despite all of the ways in which digital technology purports to simplify communication and make it more efficient.

I wouldn’t want to go back to the old days … but at times, there’s a certain attraction to the idea of not having to be “always on” in “so many places,” no?

Internet Properties: No Longer an American Monopoly

Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Marketing Communications , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The amount of translated content is also showing big-time growth.

languageAccording to an analysis by venture capitalist and Internet industry specialist Mary Meeker, in 2013 nine of the ten top global Internet properties were U.S.-based.

For the record, they were as follows (in order of ranking):

  • Google
  • Microsoft
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo
  • Wikipedia
  • Amazon
  • Ask
  • Glam Media
  • Apple

Only China-based Tencent cracked the Top Ten from outside the United States — and it just barely made it in as #10 in the rankings.

And yet … the same Top 10 Internet properties had nearly 80% of their users located outside America.

With such a disparity between broad-based Internet usage and concentrated Internet ownership, the picture was bound to change.

And boy, has it changed quickly:  Barely a year later — as of March 2014 — the Top 10 listing now contains just six American-based companies.

Ask, Glam Media and Apple have all fallen off the list, replaced by three more China-based properties:  Alibaba, Baidu and Sohu.

Paralleling this trend is another one:  a sharp increase in the degree to which businesses are providing content in multiple languages.

For websites that offer some form of translated content, half of them are offering it in at least six languages.  That’s double the number of languages that were being offered a year earlier.

And for a quarter of these firms, translated content is available in 15 or more languages.

What are the most popular languages besides English?  Spanish, French, Italian and German are popular — not a great surprise there.  But other languages that are becoming more prevalent include Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

In fact, the average volume of translated content has ballooned nearly 90% within just the past year.

The growing accuracy of computer-based translation modules — including surprisingly good performance in “idiomatic” language — is certainly helping the process along.

Moreover, when a major site like Facebook reports that its user base in France grew from 1.4 million to 2.4 million within just three months of offering its French-language site, it’s just more proof that the world may be getting smaller … but native language still remains a key to maximizing business success.

It’s one more reminder that for any company which hopes to compete in a transnational world, offering content in other languages isn’t just an option, but a necessity in order to build and maintain a strategic advantage.