How often influencers post matters most to 58% of consumers in Generation Z and millennials, and only 21% view authenticity as a crucial factor, Sprout Social recently found. Equal numbers of respondents expressed positive and negative attitudes about AI, while 27% didn't have strong feelings.

Faisal Ahmed, founder of denim brand DL1961, and Bob D'Loren, CEO of Xcel Brands, have launched the ORME social commerce app, which features shoppable short-form videos and lets shoppers become paid influencers. ORME has seven brands in the beauty, fashion, wellness, and home categories, and it uses Stripe for payments.

Meta has launched an invite-only program that will pay influencers and popular content creators up to $5,000 to create profiles on its Threads app and post content that gets at least 10,000 views. The app, which competes with X (formerly Twitter), is less than a year old but boasted an estimated 28 million daily active users on average in April -- more than X's 22 million in April.

Yelp is leveraging AI with the debut of Yelp Assistant to help customers streamline the hiring of professionals for home tasks such as repairs, lawn care and plumbing. Additionally, Yelp is testing an AI feature that would generate short videos from user content to enhance the descriptions of local businesses.

Sixty percent of business-to-business marketing leaders have larger budgets to invest in increasing brand awareness and 59% intend to use video for brand building, according to this infographic from LinkedIn. Recommendations include using video to showcase the B2B brand story and tapping the platform's features such as its Connected TV and Video on Feed services.

Video game platforms like Roblox and Fortnite could be the next digital frontier where musical performers will need a presence to keep younger fans engaged, industry experts say. While virtual concerts have proven time-consuming and challenging to develop, video games offer artists a place to showcase their music, interact with fans and sell merchandise.

Bumble, with its in-house creative team, unveiled a brand refresh that includes a more minimalist logo, bolder fonts and new app features such as Opening Moves and Dating Intentions to alleviate feelings of dating exhaustion among women. The refresh was teased on social media and a global campaign consists of out-of-home, streaming and cinemas media, Spotify and social media, including influencer outreach.

After 20 years in urban education, Camilla Ferebee is now CEO of Ferebee Scholastics and an education leadership coach who believes resilience paves the path through challenges and authenticity underpins everything for a leader. Ferebee, who offers five tips for creating a culture of authenticity, learned a vital lesson early on: "I could not expect me in everyone else. I had to accept that we were all different, and those differences were what was going to make us better."