Today in Digital Marketing - 195: Protecting Your Brand from the Next Twitpocalypse

Starting point is 00:00:01 One day after the twitpocalypse, what we know about how the global hack happened and how you can protect your brand's account. Also, Instagram is rushing its TikTok clone out. Google wants to create your ads for you. And one of the oldest social media tools finally gets a facelift. It's Thursday, July 16th, 2020. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here is what you missed today in digital marketing. And obviously, there's really only one big topic out there today. That is the fallout over

Starting point is 00:00:30 yesterday's massive hack on dozens of high profile Twitter accounts. So we're going to do it this way. First, what we think happened, then what we know didn't happen. And finally, how it all affects your brand's account. All right, here's what Twitter said. They said an employee with access to internal tools gave hackers access to a number of accounts after that employee was socially engineered. That's a nice way of saying tricked. Specifically, this employee changed the email addresses of the hacked accounts and then turned off the security features on them. But Vice Today reporting that's not the full story. A source, presumably one of the hackers, tells Vice they paid this employee to do this.

Starting point is 00:01:12 Twitter hasn't commented on that, other than to say they're looking into whether the employee hijacked the accounts themselves or gave hackers access to that internal tool. Here's what we can rule out. This wasn't a password hack. So they didn't brute force guess your password or have access to those accounts passwords. This wasn't an attack on the two factor authentication system that's still working fine. And as far as we can tell, this didn't involve Twitter's publishing API, which was a rumor as it was all unfolding yesterday.

Starting point is 00:01:42 That's what we do know. Here's what we don't know. Whether the hackers got access to more information. In particular, the DMs. Remember, Joe Biden's account was hacked. So was Barack Obama's. One notable account not on that list? U.S. President Donald Trump. But you can take off the tinfoil hat. This apparently had nothing to do with politics. The president's account had already been deleted by a Twitter contractor several years ago. Alex Stamos is the former chief security officer at Facebook. He spoke to CNBC earlier today. And it looks like they had put a bunch of protections around that account. They're going to need to expand that to a much broader set of people whose accounts are either

Starting point is 00:02:22 national security sensitive or can be used to create a lot of fraud. Also, it's not clear how those internal tools were even able to function outside Twitter's internal network at all. Usually, high security tools like that are locked behind an IP range blocker or a firewall, or if people are working from home, at the very least, a VPN tunnel. So that's where things stand with the hack as of today. Now, let's talk about your brand's Twitter account. Because this appeared to be a hack involving an internal platform-wide edit tool, there shouldn't really be any need to change your account's password. This tool would supersede any of that account level security, nor do you need to reconnect

Starting point is 00:03:02 any authorized apps. That said, though, it's always a good practice to review what apps your brand's account has connected to. At our agency, we do this with our clients' accounts every month. It's easy to get to. Log into your brand's account and visit this address, twitter.com slash settings slash applications. Another tip, install Twitter's app on your phone, log into your own personal Twitter account, then follow your brand's account and turn on notifications for it. That way, every time your brand account tweets something, you will get a notification on your phone just to make sure that tweet is on the up and up.

Starting point is 00:03:43 The White House's chief of staff told reporters late yesterday that a decision on banning tiktok from the u.s is coming in a manner of weeks not months the trump administration increasingly coming down hard on china given that tiktok is owned by a chinese company some countries like india have already banned the app which is why it's probably no surprise that Instagram is accelerating its plans to bring its TikTok clone to the U.S. They call it Instagram Reels. It's built into the Instagram app, but so far it's only been in testing in Brazil, France and Germany. Well, today, NBC News reported the feature would arrive in the U.S. and more than 50 other countries around the world in early August. That's only two or three weeks away. So how does this affect you as a digital marketer? Put this in the wait and see

Starting point is 00:04:32 category. Not many brands are active on TikTok to begin with, but if you have been, you'll definitely want to try out this new functionality in Instagram as soon as it launches. While you're at it, also check out the app called Byte, that's B-Y-T-E, which is made by the creator of the much-loved Vine and has been seeing a surge in usage since the U.S. started talking about banning TikTok. If you're just getting your brand started on these short video platforms, here's my advice. These apps have their own culture, their own vernacular. You do not want to just jump in and cross-post your brand's YouTube videos there. Spend some weekend time on the app. Watch how creators put their videos together.

Starting point is 00:05:08 The Washington Post account is an excellent one for that. And even if all you do is reserve your brand's username, that is a good start too. Still ahead, Google's new ad format that literally creates ads for you. Hootsuite refreshes its decade-old user interface. It's here, direct purchasing within Instagram. And the marketing campaign of the day involves mailing children real money. What could possibly go wrong? That's in a minute, when Today in Digital Marketing continues.

Starting point is 00:05:50 Studies show the most important factor for a successful business is timing. Launching the right product or idea at the right time. Well, now there's a way to do just that. Trendhackers.co provides you trends and opportunities before others spot them and tells you how to make money capitalizing on those trends. Get new trending products, services and ideas at trendhackers.co for free to launch your next business or product. The service was launched by a serial entrepreneur who's bootstrapped multiple companies to the millions through finding trends. So check out trendhackers.co. That's trendhackers.co. You won't regret it. They've been testing it for months, and starting today, Instagram is rolling out its integrated e-commerce platform.

Starting point is 00:06:33 They call it Instagram Shop, lets people buy products right within the app itself without ever needing to jump over to your brand's e-commerce site. Today's launch is in the U.S. only, so fellow non-Americans, we can't see it yet. But once it's rolled out, users will be able to drill down into product categories like beauty and home. To be clear, this functionality has existed for a hand-picked group of brands that they were testing with. It is, of course, an algorithm-heavy shop with products personalized to the viewer. It suggests products and brands they might like based on what brands they've followed in the past, brands they've engaged with, and so on. The downside? You will pay a small commission to Facebook if you want to use their integrated checkout feature for your products. There's a lot to do every day as a digital marketer. Meetings, plans, reviewing analytics, wrestling with pixel parameters,

Starting point is 00:07:28 and perhaps the most time-consuming, coming up with the creative for your ad campaign. This week, Google says it can take the latter off your hands with a new feature in Google Ads that will automatically create video ads based on your existing text and image assets. There's a checkbox now that lets you turn on or off this function. The company says in their tests, adding video to responsive display ads resulted in a 5% conversion lift. Also available as of today, you can participate in the beta of their upcoming video builder tool, which lets you create short YouTube clips, which you can then save as video assets

Starting point is 00:08:03 in your ads manager. And also, starting today, Google is updating the design of dynamic display ads for retail advertisers. And there's a new single image layout to highlight individual products. Both new formats display your brand name alongside your logo. You don't have to do anything in particular to enable these. They are on as of now, and you can get a preview of them while you are creating or editing responsive display ads. One of the granddaddies of social media management tools, Hootsuite, has finally updated its dashboard user interface. I say finally because until now, it's basically used the same dashboard design since it launched

Starting point is 00:08:44 12 years ago. Hootsuite's main UI is a series of columns, one for each type of content. So a page for a single Twitter account would have a separate column for DMs, a separate column for mentions, one for outgoing tweets, one for scheduled tweets, and so on. It looks like hell, but to be fair, this is the way all social tools looked like at the beginning. Hell, TweetDeck is still like that today. Then, as Hootsuite supported more and more social media platforms, they introduced tabs across the top so you could switch to different pages full of these columns. They have redesigned it, sort of. The tabs across the top are gone, and they're replaced by links on the left. Oh, and they're called boards now, not tabs. And I'm just going to say this out loud.

Starting point is 00:09:27 It looks a lot like Sprout Social now, except that inside each of these boards is the same mess of separate columns. I don't know, maybe people like 12 columns that they have to look at all the time to get a sense of what's happening on their brand's social media channels, but it just gives me an aneurysm. On the bright side, they have made the compose button available on every screen and you have to opt in to see the new look. You can go back to the old look if you prefer it, at least for now. So if you are on Hootsuite, this is definitely an improvement of sorts. Speaking of major UI changes, many marketing agencies and brands use Google for their business applications.

Starting point is 00:10:07 There's a business version of Gmail. There's Google Calendar. There's a good chance you use this package, which they call the G Suite. But Google's apps have always been separate and sort of disjointed. There's Google Chat. That's different than Google's Hangouts Chat, which isn't to be confused with Google Hangouts, which is its own thing but looks a lot like Google Meet, or maybe Meet is chat Hangouts or something. Honestly, it's been a bit of a mess. Well, this afternoon, Google announced a massive update to the platform,

Starting point is 00:10:36 perhaps the biggest in its history. Clearly trying to capitalize on the remote working trend, the new platform will be inside what you know as Gmail today, except built in will be projects, which are just like Slack channels or Microsoft team channels. Inside each project, a chat room, a place for files to live and a shared project task list. Instant messaging is back and Google Meet, which is their version of Zoom, all of these integrated now in the left nav bar of Gmail. They've opened it up to a closed beta, which you their version of Zoom, all of these integrated now in the left nav bar of Gmail. They've opened it up to a closed beta, which you can apply to be in. There's a link to that form in this episode's notes.

Starting point is 00:11:15 And finally, the digital marketing campaign of the day comes from the Country Time Lemonade brand. It's lemonade stand season. Lemonade! Lemonade for sale! But this year, things are looking dry. And those small business bailouts are going to not-so-small corporations. Steakhouses. Sports teams. Oil companies. Big guys muscling little guys out of the way? That doesn't seem right.

Starting point is 00:11:42 But now, the smallest of small businesses are about to get some help. Country Time introduces the Littlest Bailout. Stimulus checks to help kids preserve the values of lemonade stands. Yes, they are sending stimulus checks to kids that have had to close their lemonade stands due to the pandemic. Parents enter their kids in the contest, and if they are selected by random draw, they'll get a $100 bailout. It comes in the form of a prepaid gift card, but obviously someone there understands the power of visuals in this TikTok and Instagram age, so they will also get a large commemorative check to show off on social media. Brilliant in so many ways. Typical raider. Outro Music

Today in Digital Marketing - 195: Protecting Your Brand from the Next Twitpocalypse

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