Benjamin McIntyre

Hi Benjamin,

Interesting post. I think this is a really good way to use digital innovation. It never occurred to me that housing is cheaper than paying for repeat ER visits, although I shouldn’t be surprised. I think what’s great about this innovation is that it can help fight homelessness of course. I would love to see a day where no one in the world is without a home. But the reality is, when it comes to capitalism, if it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense to many businesses. I like that your value proposition is strong and makes it clear that this innovation will save hospitals and states money.

Hi Ben, I think you raise a great point here. One of the reasons I actually shifted my career away from social media marketing and into email is because I could never really see the results of my labor. In nonprofit, well any business really, raising funds for our programs was most important. I didn’t see how spending an hour on a post for 40 likes was doing that. But talking about human capital in this way, for example, can help social media marketers feel a little less jaded as I had become. Or even help marketing managers who are trying to build out their team to use the correct language when advocating for hiring social media marketers to their stakeholders. It shows that there is value beyond $$ and these terms used in the article can help them articulate it in a way they weren’t able to previously.

Thanks for this article, Ben. I agree that there is a great deal about social media that seems amorphous from a data standpoint. One of the reasons I am getting this degree is to get a better handle on this question. For me, interacting with third-party vendors that do our social media ad buying seems a bit like the way a sorcerer in medieval times worked. If things go well and are on target they take credit, and if things go badly they offer excuses surrounding unforeseen circumstances. All the while I can’t help but feel that much of it is guesswork and flim-flammery without real repeatable data or understanding of why something might work versus a different strategy. Obviously, in marketing we can only make educated guesses as to why something catches fire, but I am hopeful to learn more about how to reduce the risk on those guesses. So far I have been pretty unimpressed with partnerships with those that claim to hold the keys to the social media kingdom. .

Hi Ben. I really enjoyed reading this and I have actually never heard of this campaign, nor Black & Abroad. Part of me is a bit jaded when it comes to AI and it serving minority communities well. I think the way the technology was used in this case is beautiful. But at the end of the day, most of the people who are creating and using these technologies are not in these communities and they don’t always do their due diligence to consider everyone. Not sure if you heard of this story: https://www.mic.com/articles/124899/the-reason-this-racist-soap-dispenser-doesn-t-work-on-black-skin. It’s stories like this that make me believe that technology will fall short because the humans that are creating them fall short as well.