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Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/blockchain-crms-marketing/

Blockchain’s fallen out of favor thanks to the astronomic rise of AI and ChatGPT.

There are pros and cons to this.

On the pro side, a lot of the “make money quick” crowd and scammers that had such a negative effect on the image of blockchain brands have moved on.

They generally follow the money and that seems to be moving to AI for now.

The con side is that, as public conversations have moved away from blockchain, most people’s lasting impression of the space will be one of the scams, hacks, and shady actors.

Which is a real shame. These people will still be thinking that blockchain is nothing more than cryptocurrency exchanges or NFTs that are simple PFPs.

A little digging into the space will show you that there are some really cool solutions being created. Solutions built on blockchain that aim to make life easier by solving real-world problems.

one of the most powerful upcoming developments, in my opinion, is the growth of blockchain-based CRMs.

These things are set to revolutionize the way brands do business and attract new users. But no one wants to talk about them because there’s a lot of cash being thrown around in AI right now.

I’ll explain why these tools are so powerful shortly. Before I do, we need to understand even the basics of the blockchain and how apps work within the ecosystem.

A little blockchain 101

I won’t go into great detail on blockchain here. There are plenty of great guides online to explain what blockchain is and how it works.

In short, blockchain is an immutable public ledger. In simple terms, a record of transactions that anyone can see and no one can alter.

For example, if you know the wallet (kind of like the username) someone uses, you can see how they’ve interacted with blockchain projects.

Take the below as an example.

It’s a screenshot from a service called Etherscan, which helps you look at the on-chain data (information from blockchain transactions) to understand how someone is interacting. In this case, specifically with people and brands based on the Ethereum blockchain.

This is one of my own wallets we’re looking at.

You can see what that wallet has interacted with and, if money has been sent, how much, and to whom.

Which is kinda cool.

But how does this actually help any businesses?

The business opportunity a public ledger provides for brands

Here’s where I think the real opportunity for marketers and brands in Web3 lies.

Co-promotions and networking have always been great for brands and businesses to quickly increase their reach.

Find a brand that’s not a competitor but has an overlapping audience, and work out some form of co-promotion to expose your offer to their audience.

A simple promotion like this can bring hundreds or thousands of new users.

The problem, right now, is that getting a collaboration like this approved can be timely and it’s not guaranteed.

You could spend days pursuing a potential collaboration only to finally have the other side say “no thanks, it’s not the right time for us”.

In Web3, everything is public on the blockchain, meaning you can find people who like offers similar to yours without having to go through any gatekeepers.

Let’s head back to my wallet and look for an example.

As you can see below, I interacted with a wallet owned by Binance, the largest crypto exchange.

If I click on the link that says “Binance 18” it’ll bring up all of the people who have interacted with that specific Binance wallet.

It’s basically a huge list of people interested in and who use one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges.

If I have an offer that would appeal to those people, I can easily pull a list of them without breaking any confidentiality rules because the list is publicly available.

Imagine if you could do this with an email list.

How valuable would it be to head to a website where there’s a publicly available list of emails who have bought from brands like yours?

That’s essentially what this is.

The only difference is you’re getting access to an identifier. not a communication channel.

Current problem with blockchain data & how CRM could solve it

The first major problem you’ve probably noticed is that your list of “people” is nothing more than weird strings of letters and numbers.

With that being the only identifier, you can’t realistically reach out to them.

If you do want to reach out to them, you have to somehow marry that string of characters to a channel where you can make contact.

I’ve seen plenty of Web3 projects try this. They generally have to resort to using a simple excel sheet which, as you’d imagine, becomes quite cumbersome and difficult to manage.

Here’s the process they often use to populate the sheet with ideal users.

Click through the “to” wallet address
Check if they’ve registered an ENS domain (those .eth usernames)
If they have, head to a platform like Twitter and search for that ENS Domain
Hope they also use it for their Twitter account
If they have, add them and their Twitter account to the sheet

This process has a low hit rate of matching wallet addresses to social accounts.

It’s also massively time-consuming.

This is where a good Web3 CRM comes in. A blockchain-based CRM is built around user wallets.

You’ll be able to quickly build a list of wallets interested in similar offers to yours and add them to an excel list.

Which is great for 2 reasons.

You don’t have to waste time manually building lists of long confusing character strings
It preserves the user’s personal details and privacy – all you have is their wallet address

But hold on, you might be thinking, how do you then reach out to these users if you just have a wallet address?

Here’s the cool thing.

The better blockchain CRMs will allow you to add these users to marketing funnels that are built around their wallets.

For example, you’ll be able to send those wallets a simple airdrop NFT (something you send to their wallet for free).

According to Blocksee, these Airdrop campaigns have a 100% delivery rate as opposed to emails average open rate of 17-28%.

That delivery rate should mean your outreach is seen by more people. Add a great incentive, say a 10% discount, if they sign up for more, and you’ll populate your customer list with a lot of new interested people.

And as they’ve now opted in, you have their details to add them to a more traditional nurture sequence for more sales.

All this in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually.

It should also provide far better results as the offers are based on people who have exhibited an action showing they like offers similar to yours.

There’s a growing number of blockchain CRMs on the market (we have a growing list of the best Web3 CRMs here), but if you’re thinking about trying one out, here’s what you want to be looking for.

Dashboard that collates potential customer wallets

Great CRMs have always been about segmenting your potential customers so you can hit them with the best offers at the right time.

CRMs in Web3 are no different. The benefit here is that they can (and should) pull wallets from blockchain transactions and collate them into relevant lists for you to market to.

For example, you could set them up so they pull people into lists like…

Interacted with direct competitor
Interacted with indirect competitor
Interacted with brands covering similar interests
Who our customers have interacted with

You’ll end up with a wealth of information and multiple lists for marketing.

From there, you’ll be able to generate better campaigns. For example…

Use data to inform campaigns within the CRM

A good CRM is about more than segmentation. It’s also about communication.

With lists of people who have interacted with your competition and knowing which other brands your users love, you have a very powerful set of data.

The CRM should then let you run targeted marketing campaigns. That might include…

Marketing to interested users

Once you’ve found users interested in similar offers, you could airdrop (send something to their wallet for free) them something that entitles them to a freebie with your offer.

You know they’re interested in what you do. They just might not know you exist.

So giving them a freebie or welcome discount could get them to your brand without any real hassle on your part.

Imagine if Adidas could message everyone who’s bought a pair of Nike’s in the last year an offer to get 10% off a new pair of shoes.

Finding new collaborators

Marketing tends to follow patterns.

If a large portion of your best users is also great customers of Brand X, there’s a chance that Brand X has other users that would love your offer.

And that you have users who would love theirs.

Armed with the data of the overlap, you could reach out to their team and see if there’s a chance of a co-promotion to benefit you both.

Because you have the data that X% of your users also use theirs, it’s a much easier sell.

Simple data and analytics readouts

Finally, you’ll want decent data readouts.

This way you can better track how the campaigns you’re running are working and figure out what to drop and what to double down on.

In summary

To cut a long story short, a lot of people are trying to move on from blockchain. Its sexiness has been taken over for now by AI.

Thing is, there are some really powerful benefits to having a public ledger.

It’s basically a big list you can filter to find people who have taken action that shows they’re interested in what you offer.

A decent wallet-based CRM will allow you to filter and organize those potential customers so you can reach out to them with offers that bring them to your brand.

When else in history has there been such a simple yet powerful way to approach people who could benefit from your brand’s offer?

The post How Blockchain CRMs will Simplify Marketing for Brands appeared first on Hongkiat.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/no-code-ai-the-key-to-unlocking-efficiency-and-growth/?utm_source=rss

Learn how to take advantage of AI-powered no-code tools, which can now perform many more tasks and solve more complex business problems.

Continue reading
No-code AI: The Key to Unlocking Efficiency and Growth
on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://smashingmagazine.com/2023/03/ai-technology-transform-design/

AI-generated art is everywhere on the web. If you are an active Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest user, you likely saw interesting artworks created using text-based tools like DALLE, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion. The magic of these tools is that to generate images, all you need to do is to provide a string of text that describes what the image is all about. Many AI-generated works look stunning, but it’s only the beginning. In the foreseeable future, AI tools will be so intuitive that everyone can express their ideas. The rise of tools that have AI at their core makes design practitioners wonder if AI will replace designers.

In this article, we will overview the current state of design, answer common questions designers have about AI tools and share practical tips on how designers can make the most of using AI tools.

Design Tools Learning Curve And Creativity

Mastering any skill takes time, and design is no exception. Designers have a lot of great tools in their arsenal, but the process of honing design talent takes years. You need to invest years of your life to get to the point when you can create decent artwork.

Human-made design: glass reflection CGI. A few seconds of rendering was 87 hours on 5 RTX. (Image by Gleb Kuznetsov)

No matter how creative you are, you must spend time creating something using your hand. Most of the time, it’s impossible to go from idea to solution in a few minutes. As a result, sometimes it feels like design is 95% craft and only 5% art.

Much energy goes into the visualization of ideas, and it can be very frustrating to learn that your idea doesn’t resonate with the audience. Once you publish your work, you might learn that it’s not something your audience wants. An unsuccessful design pitch leads to a situation when your work goes straight to the garbage bin.

But in the near future, you will be able to use shortcuts and go from your idea to the final work in a minute rather than hours or days. You will be able to avoid the tedious process of physically making art and instead become a visioner who tells the computer what you want to build and lets the computer do the work for you. And you can experience the power of AI tools even today. Use Dalle.2 by OpenAI, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion.

Let’s answer a few popular questions that designers have regarding AI.

Can I Take Credit For Artworks Created By AI?

The answer is yes, you can, but you shouldn’t. Many AI artwork generation tools available on the market don’t give designers much freedom to control the process of artwork creation. As a designer, you explain your intention to the AI system through plain words and let the tool do its magic. You have limited or no information on how the tool works.

Because modern AI tools don’t give you much freedom to impact the design direction, the final result misses the human touch. Right now, you cannot convey a lot of personality in works generated by AI tools. At the same time, it doesn’t mean this will be true in the future. We will likely see the tools that give designers more control over the process of creating visual assets.

Will AI Take My Job?

Many professional artists panic because they see how good artificial intelligence has become at creating artwork. AI-generated art fills the market and takes potential clients. Instead of hiring a human digital artist, many companies ‘hire’ AI to do the job because it can do design work for a fraction of the cost. This trend not only takes jobs but also lowers the market value of the art — the artworks become less valuable because people see how easy it is to generate artwork using AI.

What happens right now is a predictable situation. It’s just how business works. If a business can save money by following a more effective approach, it will do it. During the industrial revolution of the 19th century, some English textile workers intentionally destroyed textile machines because they were afraid that machines would replace them. Of course, machines replaced some of the roles (typically, roles where heavy lifting or monotonous work was required), but they didn’t replace humans. The same is true for AI tools. AI won’t completely replace human ingenuity; it will complement human potential.

The true power of AI is not about replacing humans but instead giving them a massive boost in productivity.

If you think about the primary reason why people invented new tools in the first place, it becomes evident that work efficiency was the number one reason — the same works for AI. AI will help us work more efficiently.

The quality of your ideas and your ability to understand user problems and create solutions that help people is critically important at any age of product design, including the age of AI design.

Will AI Tools Lead Us To Generic Design?

When designers use the same tools and data inputs, they could easily end up making a homogenized design that looks generic.

But the problem of homogenized design is not new. Dribbblisation of design was a massive topic in the design field for a few years. Many people in the industry worry about the situation when a vast majority of the product design work on Dribbble looks the same (the same styles are applied).

Will the problem become worse when AI tools are popularized? The answer is no. If you look closer at the artists who publish their work at Dribbble, you will notice that there aren’t many artists who set trends. Once a new trend emerges and it resonates with the audience, many designers start to follow it and designs that look trendy.

“Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature; the second is copying the first; the third is copying the second.”
— Paul Gauguin

AI tools won’t replace all designers anytime soon because imagination and creativity will still be the powerful properties of the artist’s mind. Until AI technology becomes sophisticated enough to do creative thinking, we don’t have to worry about creating AI trends. The point is, soon, it will be possible to curate the data you will provide as an input to the system, and the AI system will learn from you, so the results will include a lot of your personality.

Can We Face Legal Troubles Using AI Tools?

Early in 2023, a group of artists filed a class-action lawsuit against Midjourney and Stability AI, claiming copyright infringement. Both Midjourney and Stability AI were trained using billions of internet images, and this suit alleges that the companies behind those tools “violated the rights of millions of artists” who created the original images. Whether or not AI art tools violate copyright law can be challenging to determine because the database used for training is massing (billions of images). But one thing is for sure — the AI tools create new images based on the knowledge they learned due to the training.

Can designers face legal troubles using AI tools in the future? So far, there is no single correct answer to this question, but the world is quickly embracing AI art (i.e., stock photo banks will start selling AI-generated stock imagery), and we will likely have more clear rules on how to use AI-generated images in the future.

The New Chapter In Design: Co-creation With AI

When Steve Jobs explained the power of computers, he said,

“What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
— Steve Jobs

It’s possible to rephrase this quote in the context of AI, saying that AI is a bicycle for our creativity — our ability to create something new. Creativity is based on life experiences and ideas that creators have. AI cannot replace humans because it uses the work that humans create as an input to produce new designs. But AI can boost creativity greatly because it becomes a sort of ‘second brain’ that works with a creator and provides new inputs.

Of course, modern AI tools don’t give us much freedom to tweak the AI engine, but they still give us a lot of power. They can provide us with ideas we didn’t think of. It makes AI an excellent tool for discovery and exploration.

Here are just a few directions of how humans and machines can work together in the future:

Conduct Visual Exploration

AI tools capture the collective experience of millions of images from photo banks and give creators a unique opportunity to quickly explore the desired direction without spending too much energy. AI becomes your creative assistant during the process of visual exploration. You prompt the system with various directions you want to pursue and let the system generate various outcomes for you. You evaluate each direction and choose the best to pursue. The process of co-creation can be iterative. For example, once you see a particular design direction, you can tell the system to dive into it to explore it.

There are two ways you can approach visual exploration, either by following text-to-image or image-to-image scenarios.

In an image-to-text scenario, you provide a prompt and tweak some settings to produce an image. Let’s discuss the most important properties of this scenario:

Prompt
A prompt is a text string that we submit to the system so that it can create an image for you. Generally, the more specific details you provide, the better results the system will generate for you. You can use resources like Lexica to find a relevant prompt.
Steps
Think of steps as iterations of the image creation process. During the first steps, the image looks very noisy, and many elements in the image are blurry. The system refines it with every iteration by altering the visual details of the image. If you use Stable Diffusion, set steps to 60 or more.

Seed
You can use the Seed number to create a close copy of a specific picture. For example, if you want to generate a copy of the image you saw on Lexica, you need to specify the prompt and seed number of this image.

In the image-to-image (img2img) scenario, AI will use your image as a source and produce variations of the image based on it. For example, here is how we can use a famous painting, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, as a source for Stable Diffusion.

We can play with Image Strength by setting it close to 0 so that AI can have more freedom in the way it can interpret the image. As you can see below, the image that the system generated for us has only a few visual attributes of the original image.

Or set Image Strength up to 95% so that AI can only create a slightly different version of the original image.

Our experiment clearly proves that AI tools have an opportunity to replace mood boards. You no longer need to create mood boards (at least do it manually using tools like Pinterest) but rather tell the system to find ideas you want to explore.

Create A Complete Design For Your Product

AI can be an excellent tool to implement ideas quickly. Today we have a long and painful product design process. Going from idea to implementation takes weeks. But with AI, it can take minutes. You can create a storyboard with your product, specify the context of use for your future product, and let AI design a product.

Providing these details is important because AI should understand the nature of the problem you’re trying to solve with this design. For example, below are the visuals that you can create right now using a tool called Midjourney. All you need to do is to specify the text prompt “mobile app UI design, hotel booking, Dribbble, Behance –v 4 –q 2”.

I think that part “mobile app UI design, hotel booking, Dribbble, Behance” is self-explanatory. But you might wonder what –v and –q means.

–v means a version of the Midjourney.
On November 10, 2022, the alpha iteration of version 4 was released to users.
–q means quality.
This setting specifies how much rendering quality time you want to spend. The default number is 1. Creating the image in higher values takes more time and costs more.

It’s important to mention a couple of common issues that images generated by Midjourney have:

Gibberish texts
You likely noticed that the text on mobile app screens in the above example is not English.
Extra fingers
If you generate an image of a person, you will likely see extra fingers on their hands and legs.

In the foreseeable future, a design created by AI will automatically inherit all industry best practices, freeing designers from time-consuming activities like UI design audits. AI tools will significantly speed up the user research and design exploration phase because the tools analyze massive amounts of data and can easily provide relevant details for a particular product (i.e., create a user persona, draft a user journey, and so on). As a result, it will be possible to develop new products right during brainstorming sessions, so designers are no longer limited to low-fidelity wireframes or paper sketches. The product team members will be able to see how the product will look and work right during the session.

Create Virtual Worlds And Virtual People In It

No doubt that the metaverse will be the next big thing. It will be the most sophisticated digital platform humans have ever created, and content production will be an integral part of the platform design. Designers will have to find ways to speed up the creation of virtual environments and activities in them. At first, designers will likely try to recreate real-world places in the virtual world, but after that, they will rely on AI to do the rest. The role of designers in the metaverse will be more like a director (a person who will tailor the results) rather than a craftsman who does it with their hand. Imagine that you can create large virtual areas such as cities and get a sense of the scale of the city by experiencing it.

It’s Time To Open A New Chapter In Design

AI-powered design solutions have an opportunity to become much more than just tools designers use to create assets. They have the chance to become a natural extension of the team. I believe that the true power of AI tools will shine when tools will learn from a creator and will be able to reflect the creator’s personality in the final design. Next-gen AI will learn both about you and from you and create works that functionality and aesthetics meet your needs and taste. As a result, the output the tools will produce will have a more authentic human fingerprint.

The future of design is bright because technology will allow more people to express their creativity and make our world more interesting and richer.

Further Reading On SmashingMag

“The Future Of Design: Human-Powered Or AI-Driven?”, Keima Kai
“How AI Is Helping Solve Climate Change”, Nicholas Farmen
“Building A Simple AI Chatbot With Web Speech API And Node.js”, Tomomi Imura
“Algorithm-Driven Design: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Design”, Yury Vetrov

Original Source: https://tympanus.net/codrops/2023/03/01/double-image-hover-effects-with-clip-path-animations/

Some ideas for hover effects using clip-path animations where the same image gets revealed in a creative way.

Original Source: https://1stwebdesigner.com/the-difference-between-the-where-and-is-css-selectors/

The CSS selectors :where() and :is() are two pseudo-classes that allow you to select elements based on their relationship with other elements. Although they sound similar, they are different in terms of functionality and syntax.

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The :where() pseudo-class was introduced as part of the CSS Selectors Level 4 specification and allows you to select elements based on the presence of other elements that match a specific condition. In other words, you can select elements based on the relationship between elements in a DOM tree. For example, you can use the :where() selector to select a list item li only if it is the first child of an unordered list ul:

li:where(:first-child of ul) {
background-color: yellow;
}

On the other hand, the :is() pseudo-class is part of the CSS Selectors Level 3 specification and allows you to select an element if it is one of several different selectors. It is similar to the logical OR operator, in CSS. For example, you can use the :is() selector to select a p element if it is either the first child of its parent or has a class of highlight:

p:is(:first-child, .highlight) {
background-color: yellow;
}

It’s important to note that the :where() selector has better browser support than the :is() selector, and that the :is() selector should not be used in conjunction with the :not() pseudo-class.