Today in Digital Marketing - 0.5%

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Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, they promised millions to equality, so how many brands delivered? Be protected. Be Zen. Everyone on TikTok is talking about. It's Wednesday, May 26th, 2021. Happy National Book Day, Uruguay. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageU Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. So, some jackass has left a negative review on your Google profile. Apparently, they're mad that you don't have any lactose-free products.

Starting point is 00:01:05 Thing is, you're a car repair shop. In some cases, Google will remove those once you dispute them. After all, they're obviously not about you. Some cases, not all. Because sometimes Google leaves them be, which might make you think, I can upvote certain reviews, right? Why don't I just upvote the good reviews

Starting point is 00:01:24 and that'll push the bad reviews down, right? Why don't I just upvote the good reviews and that'll push the bad reviews down, right? Why don't you? Today's quiz, will that work? Can you push negative reviews further down your Google profile by upvoting good reviews? The answer later in today's episode. This morning, Instagram announced it's jumping on the product drop trend and creating a space in the app for those. Drops are a kind of a new thing in e-commerce where products come and go very quickly, the idea being to encourage impulse buying. Soon, you'll be able to list your own store's drops. They'll appear with others at the top of the shop tab. And like other catalog-based listings there,

Starting point is 00:02:12 people can buy right within the app rather than being sent off to your website to finish the purchase. But what you get in convenience and perhaps a slightly higher conversion rate, you'll give up in a bit of revenue as Instagram takes a cut of those in-app sales. That said, the cut was paused temporarily last year. Marketers had already been running drop campaigns on Instagram before today, enabled by a product reminders feature they launched a couple of years ago that lets brands ping someone's

Starting point is 00:02:38 phone when a product they're interested in gets stalked. Users can bookmark a product, add it to a wish list, or share the drop with a friend via DM. And you, as the brand, can schedule drops in advance. There's even a little on-screen countdown timer and a confetti explosion when your product becomes available. This is only available in the U.S. for now, and only on mobile devices. Facebook also today announced something they've been testing since, by my count, the 16th century.

Starting point is 00:03:09 A way to hide like counts. This might seem like old news, but they actually never did roll this out fully. It's been in testing on Instagram forever. I'm not sure exactly what they were testing or why it took so long, but apparently their magic eight ball rolled over to signs point to yes, and they finally launched the thing on both Facebook and Instagram today. Quoting the company, Starting today, we're giving you the option to hide like counts on all posts in your feed.

Starting point is 00:03:35 You'll also have the option to hide like counts on your own posts, so others can't see how many likes your posts get. This way, if you like, you can focus on the photos and videos being shared instead of how many likes posts get. You can hide like counts on others' posts by visiting the new posts section in settings. This control

Starting point is 00:03:56 applies to all the posts in your feed. You can also choose to hide like counts before sharing a post. You can turn this setting on or off even after it goes live. People want more flexibility, so we thought it would be important to give people the option. In the next few weeks, you will see both of these controls come to Facebook, unquote. Okay, cool.

Starting point is 00:04:17 Now can we get Instagram DMs in the API, please? When protests in the U.S. last summer highlighted racial inequality, many companies pledged money to the effort to support people of color. A lot of money. The Financial Times reports about $50 billion in total was pledged by dozens of companies. Yesterday was the sad anniversary of the death of George Floyd, so one organization, Creative Investments Research, decided to check up on those donations and see what percentage of those pledged funds were actually donated by brands. Are you sitting down? Half of 1%. Yes, according to this research, only $250 million out of that $50 billion has actually been spent or committed to a specific initiative.

Starting point is 00:05:12 And it's not just share of budget that appears to have faded away, it's share of mind, too. Quoting TheRoot.com, In a review of transcripts of investors' meetings and earning calls, there was a tenfold increase in mentions of systemic racism and Black Lives Matter before it returned to previous levels. And while many of these companies promised increased diversity and inclusion, less than one-third of America's largest companies bothered to even look at the disparities in how they paid employees of different races. In fact, many agreed to diversity training but refused to release data So what does this mean for your work as a digital marketer?

Starting point is 00:05:55 Well, if your brand did indeed honor your donation or support your commitment, now might be a good time to highlight how that support helped. If you didn't honor it, maybe think about making that right. A poll last week by PBS and NPR found that most white people still don't believe black people are treated differently by police. First, we had e-commerce, then m-commerce. Soon, say the prognosticators, we'll be doing c-commerce. That's chat commerce. E-commerce conducted by chat apps like WhatsApp, iMessage for Business, Facebook Messenger, and so on. One big sign this is being treated seriously?

Starting point is 00:06:37 How about a $50 million funding round? Yallo, a service that helps brands use messaging apps as part of their outreach and sales programs, has raised that and says it'll spend a lot of that money on emerging markets like Latin America and Southeast Asia. You may not have heard of Yalo before, but their client list is impressive. Unilever, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Walmart. The funding is being led by B Capital, notable for its co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, one of Facebook's original people. Yalo's CEO said recently, quote, COVID fast-forwarded us into the future, and with it, the need for conversational commerce increased significantly.

Starting point is 00:07:18 It went from being one digital commerce channel to becoming the main one. Some of Yalo's customers are seeing 80% of their sales happening on top of and inside messaging apps. A huge shift when you consider how reliant some brands in the consumer packaged goods sectors have in the past been on more physical retail channels, whether that was a supermarket, a corner shop, or a vending machine. We all know advertising on Facebook is kind of a miserable experience. Ads denied for no reason, accounts shut down by bots, appeals rejected by people who probably didn't even read the appeal. To be fair, Facebook's not the only platform with problems.

Starting point is 00:07:56 This happens with Google Search and YouTube too. But the difference between Facebook and Google is that Google has people specifically devoted to outreach to its advertiser community. On the search side, there are search advocates, paid full-time employees of Google who answer questions on Reddit, run weekly Q&A live streams, and so on. There are even Twitter accounts. For SEO questions, it's at Search Liaison. For YouTube, at YouTube Liaison. Now they're adding a third, at Ads Liaison. It'll be run by Jenny Marvin, who for years was a digital marketing veteran and journalist.

Starting point is 00:08:36 Several months ago went over to Google to act as a kind of bridge between their ads platform and the advertisers who use it. Which is not to say that Facebook doesn't care about us at all. I mean, they have forms on their website we can fill out. And they won't do anything with those forms. But come on, there are forms. They must care. Right? Recently, we covered Google's plan to remove AMP

Starting point is 00:09:00 as a requirement for web pages to show up in the top stories carousel. That's the section usually devoted to news articles. Until now, if your site wasn't also serving accelerated mobile pages, you wouldn't show up in that highly coveted real estate. Now that web admins have been convinced to make their pages load faster, Google says that won't be a requirement. And having AMP pages on your site is a small extra thing. It's usually a plugin, but plugins need to be updated, settings set, and so on.

Starting point is 00:09:31 So when someone yesterday did a Twitter poll asking what their next plans with AMP were, more than 40% of the 352 respondents said they plan to remove AMP entirely from their site. If this is something you're considering too, remember, AMP is much more than SEO value. AMP pages load like almost instantly on mobile devices. It's a really good user experience. SERoundtable.com suggests a more measured approach. Quote, first test not adding AMPs to news stories

Starting point is 00:10:03 and see what happens. You might see positive results. And then, remove AMP pages from maybe 10% of your pages and see what happens. Time will tell, and this should be a slow process for all. Don't just rip out AMP from your site the day this update launches. Test it. We turn now to TikTok news, there's a small meeting going on. The text to speech voice that you're hearing now is actually a new voice. Some people say it reminds them of the narrator on those WatchMojo videos. Welcome to WatchMojo. And today we're

Starting point is 00:10:42 counting down our picks for the top 10 tough small characters. By the way, as Canadian, we Canadians are obligated to point out other Canadians in media. It's actually federal law here. In the last couple of days, this new, younger, maybe perkier, happier voice started showing up, replacing the calming Siri-like voice that we all got used to. Everyone's been trying her out using the two classic text-to-speeches. One, three of the same word without any spaces. This is her trying to say people, people, people. People-y pleple.

Starting point is 00:11:11 And of course, the always enduring. These nuts. So why the change? A lawsuit, actually. As we reported here two weeks ago, the voice actor behind the previous voice, also a Canadian, by the way, sued TikTok, saying she never consented to her voice being used for that purpose.

Starting point is 00:11:28 She'd originally recorded words for a Chinese research project on translation. And finally, Yelp has added a new label you can apply to your business profile. It is a rainbow-colored pin labeled LGBTQ owned in the app. It shows up in the More Info section on the web. It's under Amenities and More. Remember, next month is Pride Month. Back to today's quiz. Can upvoting good Google reviews push down bad Google reviews?

Starting point is 00:12:05 The answer from SEO consultancy Sterling Sky, which tested it, quoting their blog post, we had multiple people upvote a specific review that was left by a well-established local guide to see if we could get that review to replace the negative one that was displaying in the knowledge panel. We found that upvoting the review had no impact on the order of the reviews or which reviews were chosen to be displayed in the knowledge panel. The order of the reviews on a Google My Business listing is largely impacted by how recent the review is. Here are some things that we observed about the order reviews are displayed in.

Starting point is 00:12:46 Reviews that were left recently are more likely to float to the top with the default filter of most relevant selected. Older reviews show up lower on average. Ratings with no text appear at the very bottom of the list, unquote. You can read their full piece on their blog at sterlingsky.ca.

Starting point is 00:13:06 Yes, that's right,.ca. They, too, are Canadian. Well, tomorrow's episode may be a little later than usual. Google is holding its marketing live stream, so we expect a whack of announcements. And if you'll permit me a tiny bit of bragging, yesterday we hit a new record, 50,000 downloads in a single month. We closed out April at about 48.6k, as of today we're at 52,000. If the trend holds, we should hit about 55,000 at the end of the month, given that there are 22 weekdays in a month, that puts us at about 2,500 downloads each episode.

Starting point is 00:13:46 We have 342 people on our email list. Most of those are getting the free Friday episode, but 68 of you are paying for the daily in-depth emails. So thank you for being a part of this, which, by the way, is my retirement plan. No, actually, it really is. The plan is to sell the agency in a couple of years and dive into this. If you have any suggestions, I'm easily reached on Twitter at Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:14:09 All my social links are in the episode notes. Talk to you tomorrow. You know I'm living free You know I'm living free

Today in Digital Marketing - 0.5%

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