Today in Digital Marketing - 196: What The Hell Is With the Donut?! 🍩

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, a new entrant in the live streaming game could mean a fully branded experience for your customers. The surprising effect that one very common web page design element has on your Google ranking. You can now run your ads on Hulu without a million dollar budget. And the new Twitter features coming to the third party tool that you use. It's Friday, July 17th, 2020. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here is what you missed today in digital marketing brought to you by TrendHackers.co. Twitter has provided some more detail about the huge hack this week that targeted more than 100 of the platform's biggest names. If you are responsible for your brand's Twitter account,

Starting point is 00:00:43 it's definitely worth hearing. I'm just going to quote the company verbatim here. Quote, we have no evidence that attackers accessed passwords. Currently, we don't believe resetting your password is necessary. Out of an abundance of caution, and as part of our incident response yesterday to protect people's security, we took the step to lock any accounts that had attempted to change the account's password during the past 30 days. As part of the additional security measures we've taken, you may not have been able to reset your password. Other than the accounts that are still locked, people should be able to reset their password now. If your account was locked, this does not necessarily mean we have evidence that the account was compromised or accessed. So far, we believe only a small subset of those locked accounts were compromised, but are still investigating and will inform those who were affected.

Starting point is 00:01:32 Based on what we know right now, we believe about 130 accounts were targeted by the attackers in some way as part of the incident. For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send tweets from those accounts. So for most of us, that's all good news. No need to change your password, and they don't think the hackers got into your DMs. The same can't be said for those unfortunate 130 accounts that were compromised, though. They are still checking to see if those DMs were out there. And you thought you had a bad week. There is some good news coming from Twitter,

Starting point is 00:02:23 though, and that is that they are still planning to launch their API soon. APIs, again, kind of a backdoor that lets your third-party tools do things on these social media platforms, like tweet, delete tweets, search for things, and so on. One of the problems with APIs is that they are almost always a little bit behind the native user experience. For instance, you as a user can pin a tweet using the front-facing Twitter website or its apps, but because that pinning functionality isn't in the API, none of the third-party tools like Hootsuite or Agorapulse or Buffer can do any pinning. This new Twitter API is a bit of that catch-up and will finally include things that we've been able to do on the front side like

Starting point is 00:03:02 conversation threading, polls, pinned tweets, spam filtering, and more powerful stream filtering. But according to a report from TechCrunch, some of the very new things, like audio tweets and the ability to control who can reply to a tweet, still apparently not in the new API, though TechCrunch says Twitter should be deciding on which of these extremely new features to move into the API, quote, in later weeks. They say the new API has been developed with code that will make it simpler for them to keep updated with new features as they launch them. They'd actually planned to launch it today, but of course they've been a little bit busy with that hack so they plan to turn it on sometime next week.

Starting point is 00:03:42 That said, don't go looking for those features in your third-party tool of choice that soon. Remember, once these features are available in the API, only then can programmers at those platforms begin building them into their own platforms. So expect these new features to be weeks or months away from when you and I get to use them. Or, of course, platforms could simply choose not to program them, even though they are available

Starting point is 00:04:05 in the API. Hulu, the American TV streaming site, is opening up a self-service ads portal for small and medium-sized businesses to launch ad campaigns there. Until now, Hulu has only worked with about 200 brands. Brands with big budgets, of course. But as of next Wednesday, anyone can put ads there. Well, anyone with a minimum campaign spend of 500 bucks. Of course, you won't get an ad account rep for that, but they say they will have some support options at launch. Your ads will go through a review process before they go up on the platform, similar to how Facebook reviews your campaigns. This is good news not only for us digital marketers, but also the viewers who have long complained that they see the same brands over and over again.

Starting point is 00:04:51 Hulu, of course owned by Disney, the announcement came the same day as NBCUniversal launched Peacock, its new TV and movie service that will compete directly with CBS All Access, HBO, Netflix, Disney+, and all those. Remember the good old days when we used to whine about having to pay $3 a month if we wanted to add a specific channel to our cable package? Well, now we pay $12 a month to stream individual channels. So, yay? Victory?

Starting point is 00:05:23 Still ahead, Amazon wants your brand to live stream on their new platform. And while you may want to reverse that fancy new web design you just launched, that's in a minute when Today in Digital Marketing continues. 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.

Starting point is 00:06:01 Get new trending products, services, and ideas at trendhackers.co for free to launch your next business or product. Thank you. dot co you won't regret it when websites first launched of course they were just gray pages with text and then html got better and we could do things like make tables and columns and in time fancier things like accordions you know accordions don't you those boxes where text is kept hidden behind a click that click doesn't go to a new page it just expands the box and then you can see the text often websites use it to hide stuff that they need to have on the page for legal reasons, but don't want it to be prominent, like a list of food ingredients. And all this time, Google engineers have said, listen, text is text. Whether it's inside an accordion or behind a tab, it'll all still rank just fine. There's no difference between it being in one of those interactive

Starting point is 00:07:03 elements or just being on the page as regular text. But one new study is countering Google's claim and has found that bringing content out of those accordion boxes can result in a significant uptick in traffic from the search engine. The study is from Search Pilot. They took a page of food product information, a page where an accordion hid four chunks of text, ingredients, product information, nutrition data, and reviews. They took that text out of those accordions so that the information was visible when the page loaded and got a 12% uplift in organic sessions, and that number was even higher on mobile.

Starting point is 00:07:42 That said, this was just one test, apparently with just one page. So as always, your mileage may vary. But if you are the kind of digital marketer who likes to do a lot of A-B testing on your page, this one might be one to try. Last year, Amazon bought Twitch.tv, the video game streaming site. The acquisition made sense. Twitch has lots of eyeballs, and they sell video ads to those eyeballs. More eyeballs equals more revenue. Today, we may have learned that the acquisition's endgame wasn't ad revenue as much as being able to build out an entirely new service offering, an offering which launched today, called Interactive Video Service.

Starting point is 00:08:25 And essentially, it's a white-label Twitch for brands that want to incorporate live video without investing in a whole streaming infrastructure. And sure, you can stream on Facebook Live or YouTube Live or Instagram Live, but that means you're doing it on someone else's site with someone else's rules and branding. So if you'd rather have a live stream experience from your brand's own website,

Starting point is 00:08:47 a direct one, not embedded from another service, now you can. Amazon claims it has a latency of less than three seconds. That's the amount of time it takes for video to get from the camera to the viewer. Latency is important in live videos that have any level of interaction with the audience. Personally, I doubt the three-second stat.

Starting point is 00:09:05 I watch Twitch every single day, hours of it. I don't watch it, it's just on while I work. Even as I record this very podcast, on my screen to the left here is a Romanian Overwatch healer main playing Ana. And Twitch's latency seems to be around 10 seconds. This is part of the reason I'm mourning the pending closure of Microsoft's competitor to Twitch, which they called Mixer, because their platform had almost zero latency. Anyway, their new IVS service will have many of the interactive features that Twitch users know,

Starting point is 00:09:40 a chat room, e-commerce capabilities, polls, leaderboards, Q&As, and so on. Or for that matter, theoretically, you could use it to create a direct competitor to Twitch itself. The pricing will be based on an hourly rate calculated by total duration of video input and output. Finally, it's World Emoji Day. And today, several platforms announced new emoji for us all to use. Facebook has some new animations in its Messenger emoji pack. Google previewed a new set of more diverse emoji characters coming to Android in the fall. Apple has its own version of all these, of course, since new emoji are governed by an international body called the Unicorn Consortium.

Starting point is 00:10:20 So expect to see new ones, including pinched fingers, some new animals, an anatomical heart and lungs. Apple's standalone Memoji characters also got some more headwear options to reflect different faiths and occupations. I just checked the top emoji on my own frequently used list, and apparently it's a donut? I don't think I've ever used a donut emoji. The internet is broken, friends. Bail out now while you can. Would you believe me if I told you she is sunshine? And that wraps up a somewhat stressful week in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:10:58 Our theme is by Mark Blevis, music licensing by Source Audio, and special thanks to the band Cosmosaurus from my hometown of Nanaimo, Canada for permission to use this song of theirs. Links to all their channels in this episode's notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you on Monday. But I know that a

Starting point is 00:11:17 radiance so true cannot be mine Yet it seems I'm dazzled by the shine I can't deny it.

Today in Digital Marketing - 196: What The Hell Is With the Donut?! 🍩

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.