Today in Digital Marketing - 162: Trump’s Twitter Fight is YOUR Problem Now

Starting point is 00:00:00 Trump's fight with Twitter may have a direct impact on your marketing work. Details on Google's next big algorithm update. Facebook tries to push into the live events space. And it's another round of which one of these three features has Twitter rolled out. It's Friday, May 29th. Happy Democracy Day, Nigeria. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Legal experts are warning that the latest executive order from U.S. President Donald Trump may have direct implications to websites like your brands. The order is part of a pissing match that Trump and Twitter are currently having, and asks federal agencies to revoke legislation that protects websites from being sued for things their users say on their site. But the order isn't just aimed at Twitter. It affects every website where there's user participation. And that might include your brand's website. Do you have a blog with a comment section? Do you have a place for people to leave reviews or even ask questions about your products? All, in theory, could be included in the wide language of this executive order, opening

Starting point is 00:01:09 the door to lawsuits that, as a platform and not a publisher, as with the current definition of your website, you are currently protected from. The going consensus seems to be that this is just too broad and perhaps unconstitutional, might be more designed to rile up the president's political base than have any actual enforcement value, but still, something to watch. Comcast is spinning off its TV advertising platform known as BlockGraph. It will be splitting ownership of the service with ViacomCBS and Charter Communications. Now, each of these firms will own a third of the platform.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Financial deals of the term were not disclosed. Quoting Marketing Dive, BlockGraph offers anonymized data that does not bump up against consumer privacy concerns. It provides marketers with insights across platforms without having to rely exclusively on third parties. The Interactive Advertising Bureau's report on U.S. digital advertising is out, and, well, 2019? Kind of a mixed bag.

Starting point is 00:02:11 While, yes, revenue rose about 16% from the year before, it turns out this was the lowest growth rate since 2012. Remember, this report is from 2019, well before the pandemic. The report says a lot of that growth was focused in digital audio and video across both mobile and desktop. And the report says 2020 overall may see the first dip in U.S. digital ad revenue in more than a decade. Global ad spend is set to fall nearly $50 billion this year. That's more than 8% as businesses across industries cancel or delay media buys. Late this morning, the New York Times reported that Google has rescinded job offers to thousands of people who had agreed to work there, saying they are expecting a large shortfall in ad revenue. In case you're curious, spending on social media makes up 29% of the overall pie.

Starting point is 00:03:11 Google says a new algorithm update for its search engine is coming next year, and they've given us a few details on how it will change the way they rank pages. First, the update will be called the Page Experience Update. SEroundtable.com has a good brief on it. Link in the notes. They say it will somewhat remove the need for AMP. Those are those kind of instantly created mobile-friendly article pages. And page experience scores will play a bigger role than it has in the past. Google continues to tell digital marketers to focus on creating great content

Starting point is 00:03:39 and not sweat the little technical details. In fact, they say even if your website provides a poor page performance, if your content is relevant, it will still rank really well. Heads up if you work in sports marketing or work for a news brand. Facebook is testing a new mobile app designed to take some of the steam out of Twitter's popularity around live events. The app is called Venue. They're testing it first with this weekend's NASCAR race.

Starting point is 00:04:09 Quoting Ted Crunch, The new app appears to be a challenge to Twitter, which today serves as the de facto second screen for commenting on live events and engaging with fellow fans. On Twitter, fans often use hashtags to add their commentary to live events. It can range from TV show premieres to sports competitions to major political happenings, unquote. But Facebook's app is a little different in execution. Getting back to TechCrunch here, instead of having everyone viewing the event constantly chiming in with their own thoughts and reactions, the commenters for a given event hosted in venue will only include well-known personalities like journalists, current or former

Starting point is 00:04:45 athletes, or aspiring fan analysts. The latter could include some popular social media personalities, for example, unquote. Kind of a strange approach, to be honest. I think part of the reason Twitter is often the go-to forum for live events is precisely because anyone can add to the discussion. Still, it will be interesting to watch how the first few tests play out. Social media tool Agora Pulse has added some nice additions to their platform. You can now perform inbox actions like labeling and assigning all in one go. Click the ones you want to act on or select all, and then you get some options for bulk processing.

Starting point is 00:05:24 They also talked in their blog post about it today about something they call unified calendars, which I think they mean that their calendars will show published content even if it wasn't published through Agora Pulse. They make this out like it's a really big deal. I don't know if it's that big a deal because honestly I'm pretty sure most of the other platforms do this by default because that's just the way the API sends in the posts. I could be wrong, though. I am not an API expert. Still, there is a link in this episode's notes if you'd like to read up on those changes over at Agorapulse. And finally, Twitter announced a new feature

Starting point is 00:05:56 yesterday. So it's time to play another round of Guess Which Feature. Here's how this game works. I will read three features, only one of which they launched, and you tell me which one it was. Was it the ability to edit tweets, reasonable pricing for the Firehose API, or the ability to schedule tweets from their web app? As always, I'll give you a bit of time

Starting point is 00:06:19 to think... Time's up! Yeah, you can schedule tweets now if you want to on their web app. And no, you still can't edit them. Well, my apologies to the few of you who follow my Twitter account. Hairspray, the version of the musical that they did on live TV, that was streaming today online as part of a fundraiser.

Starting point is 00:06:38 And I really like musicals, so I may have tweeted a lot about it for a couple of hours. Hashtag sorry not sorry. And since you asked, my pick for the most underrated musical of all time, Legally Blonde the Musical. I'm serious. My wife and I are going on holiday next week. We're not actually going anywhere because there's nowhere to go these days. So I guess we'll just wake up and see.

Starting point is 00:07:05 We'll probably be sleeping in and playing Xbox. But this show will continue. McKenna Hadley-Burke from our agency will be filling in for me all next week. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening.

Today in Digital Marketing - 162: Trump’s Twitter Fight is YOUR Problem Now

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