Today in Digital Marketing - 116: Strange Days, Indeed (and bonus episode of INSIDE)

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

This episode contains a sample episode of my new (temporary) podcast project: "INSIDE: Voices from Quarantine". You can subscribe at http://anchor.fm/nanaimo Can you help spread the word? Review this podcast at https://ratethispodcast.com/today AND/OR click https://ctt.ac/o713H to preview a tweet you can publish Today in Digital Marketing is brought to you by engageQ digital. Can we help you with YOUR brand’s digital marketing and social media? Let’s chat. http://www.engageQ.com or call 1-855-863-6233. TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: Tod’s web site: http://TodMaffin.com Tod’s agency: http://engageQ.com LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/todmaffin Twitter: http://twitter.com/todmaffin Instagram: http://instagram.com/todmaffin Facebook: http://facebook.com/tmaffin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@todmaffin Mixer: https://mixer.com/HappyRadioGuy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Monday, March 23rd, 2020. I'm Todd Maffin. Well, I'm back. I'm in self-isolation at home with my wife and our dog and our cat. I am a tiny bit symptomatic, so I'm hoping this is just my regular allergies. I am not with my usual setup, so this might sound a little off. But the world of digital marketing is still out there, though it's certainly quieter than it was a couple of weeks ago. So thank you for your patience while I took a week off to figure stuff out. But the world of digital marketing is still out there, though it's certainly quieter than it was a couple of weeks ago. So thank you for your patience while I took a week off to figure stuff out. And let's get on with today's update.

Google is making some changes to their Google My Business as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here's what's new. They are, for now, manually reviewing new listings, claims, and verifications for critical health-related businesses. So you can expect a delay if your brand is not in those categories and you make a change requiring Google approval. Also during this crisis, they say new reviews, review replies, and new Q&As will also be unavailable. Also, Google is bending their rules about what you can and can't use in your business name. Now, and this only applies to restaurants, they say they will approve brand name changes if you want to add delivery available or takeout available to your restaurant name. This is temporary, of course.

Normally, they don't permit this. Analytics firm Media Radar says, while you and I may have paused our advertising on the social channels, e-commerce spending on ads jumped big time. Ad spend on those sites doubled for a trailing four-week period starting on February 17th, compared to the same period starting March 9th. Quoting Marketing Dive, the firm conducted the study after Amazon, which has an estimated 38% share of the U.S. e-commerce market, announced last week that it plans to hire 100,000 more warehouse and delivery workers. The company is expanding headcount to keep up with demand for online shopping as consumers are forced to stay home because of the coronavirus, unquote.

Facebook is shutting down MSQRD, the augmented reality app it bought in 2016. The app was a sort of selfie app, but they hadn't updated it in years. Facebook says the need for the code and the app is gone now, as they use that app to drop AI functionality into Spark AR, the code behind their creator platform, and special camera effects across their other apps. In other Facebook news, last week they launched a new Stay Home in Stories. You may have seen this, you may not have realized what it actually does. If you use the sticker, whatever you post with it gets added to a shared Instagram story that shows people staying home and safe. A couple of smart ad campaigns out there in the midst of all this pandemic stuff.

Popeyes, the American fast food chain, has a clever Twitter campaign. They call it the Fried Chicken and Chill campaign, you know, like Netflix and chill. They asked people to tweet a photo of themselves eating Popeyes food along with the hashtag that password from Popeyes food along with the hashtag thatpasswordfrompopeyes. The first 1,000 posters got a DM back from the brand that contained the username and password for its Netflix account. I'm not sure how they got an account from Netflix that supports 1,000 concurrent logins. I think the highest plan is five, but perhaps they bought a special enterprise plan from Netflix? In Brazil, McDonald's changed its iconic golden arches logo.

And yes, if you are a brand manager and you just felt a twang of nausea right now, me too. This went against every page in their brand style guide, I'm sure. But how they changed their logo was brilliant. All they did was split the arches in two. A nod to the social distancing we're all being asked to do. Normally, this is where I'd sign off and say see you tomorrow, and I am going to do that as well. But given that you're a podcast listener, you may be interested in a new podcast that I'm doing temporarily through this COVID-19 thing.

It's called Inside Voices from Quarantine. I'm going to drop the first episode here at the end of this digital marketing podcast. So feel free to skip to the next show in your queue if you don't want to hear it. Or if you'd like to subscribe to this new podcast, look for Inside Voices from Quarantine in your podcast app or tap the link in this episode's description. Please stay safe, friends. I'll see you tomorrow. Okay, I think I did this right. I'm still learning the whole phone recording thing. Are you there?

Yeah, I'm here. This is Inside. Voices from Vancouver Island's quarantine. I'm Todd Maffin. Well, thank you for calling in. So I don't know anything about you. Who are you? Well, my name is Wren and I live in Yellow Point.

It's in between Nanaimo and Ladysmith. How long have you lived here? I moved to Nanaimo in 2014. In kind of actually that summer, I lived in Parkville and then went to university in Nanaimo for four years and moved out here to Yellow Point, I believe in 2018. Yeah. So what's your situation here with the whole quarantine? I live on a five acre farm. You can probably hear my chickens in the background.

I like to talk on the phone while I'm watching them in the coop. So there's some cheeping that's just the chicken. For us, there's actually a lot of work to do here. So when we kind of figured out the situation was starting to get serious, we bought some extra supplies for the animals and then kind of decided that we'd mostly stick on the farm as much as we can. We do have a health care worker living with us. My roommates, there's two adults, two kids. They own this land, and one of them is a health care worker in Nanaimo, so she does go to Nanaimo to do her job, and then me, the dad, and the two kids just kind of stay here and do the farm stuff. Do you feel on a farm more protected or less protected,

or do you feel any different with all this, being that you're sort of in a rural setting? Yeah, we've been pretty anxious because we just started our own farm this year. I had been working at a vegetable farm nearby, but we decided to branch out and we were going to decut flowers. And we have all our supplies purchased and we had signed up for all the farmers markets and all these different events that are happening, like the Vancouver Island market and the pride parade in June. We had all these markets that we'd already signed up for and now they've been canceled so we've spent

you know all our money on flowers and then it's kind of like we're in a precarious situation because yeah we're like safe out here because we're not surrounded by people and stuff and we're quite comfortable you know we've got lots of stuff to do but it's like okay now how are we going to make our living because everything has now how are we going to make our living? Because everything has changed. How are you going to make your living? We have lots of chickens, so worse comes to worse. We will not run out of food. But, yeah, there's a lot of online markets starting.

I know the lady who does the Bevan Park Island Roots Market, that's Michelle. She's been looking into doing an online market with, I think, FoodShare and a few other, like the lady who does the Vancouver Island Market, she was looking into doing online sales too. And there was an online farmer's market and the lady, Sarah, who did that, she's giving all her, like any knowledge that she had from those two years that she ran an online market, She's giving that to anyone who needs it. So there's, you know, there's definitely options there. Like, I don't know much about farming and how the land and ownership of the land works and everything like that. But like, is that property mortgage?

It's a mortgage. They bought it almost two years ago. So I know my roommates have been checking in with the bank. They're with one of the credit unions and seeing what kind of options there are for them. Because not like one of them is a health care worker, so she's still working. But now they don't have any child care anymore. One of the kids was in daycare and now the daycares and stuff are canceled because she's not school age. So the school age kids are in daycare, but she's not in daycare anymore. But there are government benefits for that. Like we're in Doug Routley's riding and I know he's been sending out updates about what kind of childcare benefits you can get and what kind of,

um, mortgage help you can get. So there are definitely those options. And the fact that like taxes have been pushed back to you, that helps me a lot. Usually this this time of year i don't have as much money to pay back taxes because i've had to get through the winter this year if it's pushed back you know i'll have more time and i won't have to worry too much about that as long as we can sell some products is it something that people can do in in your area with flowers like is it possible for you to sell flowers to people on the island who are nearby? So they're not growing yet. Like we're, we're in the midst of, um, getting our fields ready and we're planting them out. We have all the seeds and we have half the transplant started,

but these were all, we were going to sell them as local flowers. So only on the island to people in like the Ladysmith, Nanaimo area. And, you know, we're still going forward with that plan too, but it's, you know, it might've been better if we were still growing vegetables. We're still definitely going forward with that plan because we already have all the supplies, but we'll look into having other options too. Do you have any friends outside of the island? Yeah. My parents both live in Vancouver. Do you notice like any kind of the island? Yeah, my parents both live in Vancouver. Do you notice any kind of difference between the way that you're feeling on a farm on an island versus the way that they're feeling in more of a city?

I was talking to my uncle and aunt in Toronto this morning. We actually tried out Zoom for the first time. It was my uncle, aunt, my cousin, and my mom who was in Surrey and Vancouver. They all three, all of them, like my mom who was in Vancouver and them in Toronto, they said the roads are deserted. Like whenever they go anywhere, there's no rush hour. My mom works in an office and everyone except her is working from home. So she's like got all the space to herself at the office. To them, it seems shocking because they're used to seeing so many people and being around so many people. Like my life hasn't changed all that dramatically,

but I do notice people in the city being just kind of shocked how like, oh wow, there's like no traffic or there's no traffic jams or, you know, we can really get around, but they don't have anywhere to go, of course, because a lot of things are closed. And are your parents and relatives out there safe and healthy right now? Yeah. I actually don't know anyone who isn't healthy. I've been keeping track with a lot of my friends in Ladysmith and everyone seems to be doing fine. Like everyone's very anxious. There's a lot of fear. One, it's like the fear of like a lot of people with immune suppression it's like oh if I get it how bad is it going to be and then other people like how can I keep like people around me safe in case I get it like like I'm a I'm in my 20s fairly healthy so I'm more worried about like

if I'm a vector for like getting other people who are less healthy sick, you know, so I'm healthy right now. I basically haven't left the farm in a week, but, you know, I'm definitely making sure if anyone called me and asked me to bring them groceries, I would still keep cautious and make sure I don't have contact with them, just pick up their stuff and deliver it, but make sure I'm clean and I'm not visiting with them just because I don't want to be like a carrier, right? Just as you called, my wife and I were about to drive down to Duncan,

which is where my mom lives, and we've prearranged this protocol with her. We're going to drop the stuff off here, and then we're going to stand here. We're going to call you. We'll talk with the window. Do you have a science background? I don't know many people that use the word vector in normal conversation like you just did.

Well, I studied geography, which wasn't, it was a bachelor's art, but my roommate is an engineer. So, yeah, he uses a lot of big words. Is there anything that you would want to tell people on Vancouver Island? I definitely want to tell people to stay home. Like living with a healthcare worker, that's when her friends ask her like, oh, what can we do to support you and your colleagues? She's like, just stay home because we don't want to be overburdened. I do want people to respect that and stay home, but not to be scared.

I'm like, this can be like an opportunity for us all to slow down and kind of figure out what's important in our lives. You know, I've been kind of looking at my trajectory in life. What do I actually want and what do all of this after it's all over? I guess I don't know what the outcome is, so it depends what happens. If a lot of people get sick, can this last for like... What happens if this lasts until September? We don't have any farmers markets. People are staying inside. All the kids' camps are cancelled. What are teachers even going to do in a week when they go back to school?

People starting university in September, like, are they just going to do online classes and stay at home? What's education going to look like? Well, thank you so much for taking the risk of picking up the phone and calling the phone number of someone you don't know. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you. Inside is a special series of the Nanaimo Chronicles podcast. And I'd like to hear from you too. Call me. Here's my number. 778-725-0166.

I want to know how you're holding up and how your family's doing. My number again is 778-725-0166. We'll see you next time. clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.