Facebook Launches M, a Siri-Like Personal Assistant for Messenger

Today Facebook announced its beginning a very small roll out of a digital assistant service that will live within Messenger. The service, called M, is capable of completing tasks and finding information upon request.

Facebook’s M calls to mind Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, but what sets M apart is how you interact with it. While Siri and Cortana are built for voice commands, M is designed to be communicated with via text message.

In one of the examples shown, M is asked to recommend an item and then later asked to have it purchased for the user. The whole exchange is completed within Messenger as though chatting with a friend.

M is empowered in a way that sets it apart from other digital assistants. M has the ability to complete tasks such as reserve hotels, make purchases, book flights, recommend things to do, and so on.

Since it is powered by artificial intelligence, which is trained and supervised by people, it’s able to complete requests that require it to think. It’s capable of making personalized recommendations and can even navigate customer service hotlines if that’s what is necessary to complete a task.

M will be available to a “very, very small” number of people in the Bay Area to start, according to a company spokesperson, but the idea is to build it into an at-scale service.

It’s built for both iOS and Android and is said to be slowly rolling out more widely in the coming months.

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Categories: Facebook Facebook Apps News

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Instagram Landscape and Portrait Mode Are Here! Third-Party Apps No Longer Needed

Instagram just introduced one of its most significant changes in recent memory — landscape and portrait modes for photos and videos. In addition to the traditional square photos, Instagram now natively allows the ability to post media in portrait and landscape orientations. This means you can post your photos and videos as they were originally shot.

No more cropping videos that you shot in widescreen, or selfies you took in portrait mode. According to the company, nearly one in five photos or videos people post aren’t in the square format. With the help of third-party apps Instagram users have been able to accomplish posting media without cropping it.

With today’s update, it sounds like those third-party apps are destined to become obsolete. The company admits, “we know that it hasn’t been easy to share this type of content on Instagram”, but now that problem has been fixed. Here’s how it works: Choose a photo or video Tap the brand new format icon on the bottom left to adjust the orientation. Choose your filters, and so on. Once shared, the full-sized versions of your media in landscape and portrait format will appear in a much more natural way than it would have before with a third-party app.

On your profile screen the photo grid will remain square — any media that’s not natively square will appear as a center-cropped square. In addition, all filters can now be used for all types of media. There’s no longer filters just for photos and filters just for videos. Those are two major changes in one day that are sure to change the landscape (pun intended) of Instagram for the foreseeable future. Widescreen video opens up a lot of new opportunities.


Even when using third-party apps in the past, rendering and uploading widescreen video was a terribly tiresome process. Now it sounds like it will be just like uploading any other video. With this update you can check ‘landscape/portrait mode’ off the list of most wanted Instagram features. Next, it would likely please a lot of people if the app offered a native re-gram feature. Editorial Credit: tulpahn / Shutterstock.com

Categories: Instagram News

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SEJ Wrap-Up: Top 10 Review Sites You Need to Monitor and Could Google Sway the Election?

Online reviews have become an essential part of running any type of business in 2015. While traditionally an afterthought, monitoring online reviews is now a necessity, says SEJ contributor Jason Hawkins.

Your first step, however, is to determine where you can find these reviews so you can monitor them. In this week’s top post, Jason presents a list of 10 of the top review sites on the web where you should be monitoring what people are saying about your business. See the full list here.
SEJ Summit Coming to New York on September 16th!



Anyone can request a complimentary invite to attend a SEJ Summit conference, but big-brand, enterprise marketers will get priority. Tickets are also available for purchase. Admission is $300 per person inclusive of catered breakfast, lunch, breaks, networking reception, and WiFi. To buy, visit our Eventbrite page.
Could Google Sway the Election?

Google search has the power to rig the 2016 election, at least that’s what researchers have come to believe. According to their study, something called the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) has the ability to shift the opinions of undecided voters by 20% or more.
If Google’s search algorithm started to surface more positive results than negative for a candidate, searchers could end up having a more positive opinion of that candidate. Read more about the study and its takeaways inthis week’s top news story.

Categories: News

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Instagram Improves Direct Messaging With Threaded Convos and Enhanced Emojis

Instagram has announced a set of improvements to its direct messaging feature, which included threaded conversations and enhanced emojis Instagram Direct has garnered 85 million monthly users since launching in 2013, but the service was never on par with direct messaging offered by competitors like Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter. Today,

Instagram is introducing much needed threaded conversations. That means you don’t have to create a new conversation with someone every time you want to DM them a new photo. Now you can just drop in a photo as though you were sending a text message and keep the conversation going. In addition, Direct now has a quick camera feature for replying with a selfie, and there is a new ability for sending gigantic emojis.


An update to the main feed will allow you to send content from your timeline as a direct message. This feature was inspired by the growing trend of users tagging other users in comments as a way to share a photo with them. According to the company, nearly 40% of comments include an @-mention.

Users can now share content directly with others by tapping on the new arrow that appears next to the like and comment buttons. This will allow you to share the post as a DM. These updates to Instagram are now available on both iOS and Android. Editorial Credit: 10 FACE / Shutterstock.com

Categories: Instagram News

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Supercharge Your Citation Campaigns using CitationTracker

This post was sponsored by BrightLocal.com.

Auditing and cleaning up local directory listings is critical to performing well in local search.

In fact, 55% of local experts say accurate citations are ‘critical’ to local search ranking.

However, the actual process of finding and fixing your local listings is tricky, time-consuming, and often full of frustrations.

But, help is close at hand!

There are a few online tools that can help you. The most powerful & feature-rich of these is CitationTracker from BrightLocal.com

CitationTracker is just 1 of 7 unique tools within BrightLocal’s suite of local search tools which is used by over 15,000 SEOs and agencies.

This powerful tool solves 5 of the biggest challenges that SEOs and business owners face when it comes to managing their local directory listings.

1. Tracking Down All Existing Citations

CitationTracker scours the web and identifies where your business details are displayed on thousands of sites from Google+ Local right down to hyper-local and niche directories. In your report, you can see the Domain Authority score as well as BrightLocal’s unique ‘Citation Value’ score for each site so you can order them by importance.

2. Completing a Detailed a NAP Audit

CitationTracker runs a full NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) audit on the most important 50 local sites such as Google+ Local, Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, and many others. All NAP issues are highlighted so you can quickly spot any discrepancies and fix them.

3. Identifying Troublesome Duplicate Listings

This is a new feature in CitationTracker that searches for duplicate listings, which display the same or similar NAP details to your main profile. CitationTracker reports on suspected “dupe” listings so you can quickly manage them.

4. Discovering High-Value Citation Opportunities

Other than fixing your current citations, it’s also important to build new citations to boost your local ranking. CitationTracker audits high-ranking local competitors and tells you where they’re listed, but you are not. The tool also displays the Domain Authority of each site, tells you the type of site is it (e.g. a Local Directory), and if the site offers a free listing. These offer a great insight to help you prioritize which new sites to get listed in.

Categories: News

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