Today in Digital Marketing - A Porn Star and a Nun Walk Into a Business Show

Episode Date: March 11, 2021

Twitter borrows a page from Facebook… Reddit doesn’t want to be at the kids’ table any more… Google’s courses could get you a degree in a half-year, and the most unique business show on the Internet.We’re looking for a regular fill-in host. If you have journalism/podcast experience and a good mic, go to TodayInDigital.com/hostGet the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterMORE:NEW! Podcast Perks: Exclusive Deals for ListenersAdvertising: Perks (free!) • Ads • Classifieds • Brand TakeoversJoin Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterEnjoying the show? Please rate and review us!Leave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok (daily digital marketing tips)Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, Twitter borrows a page from Facebook, Reddit doesn't want to be at the kids' table anymore, Google's courses could get you a degree in a half year, and the most unique business show on the internet. It's Thursday, March 11th, 2021. Happy Independence Day, Lithuania! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. For some breaking news, this afternoon, some people on Twitter started reporting that their iOS devices have started asking them if they want to let their apps track their behavior. Yes, this is apparently the start of the IDFA change that most people believe will have a significant negative impact on digital marketing campaigns.

Apple never did say exactly when they would start rolling it out, but it appears that rollout has started. More on this breaking news tomorrow. Well, some good news for those of you whose job includes monitoring comments on your brand's social media channels. TikTok is adding the ability to hold all comments until you can review them. This is rolling out now, so expect it in the next app update you get.

It'll be in settings under privacy, then comment filters. Look for the filter all comments toggle. Basically, you'll get a simple screen where you can approve or delete comments one by one. This is great for brands that tend to get a lot of spam or trolls. TikTok doesn't yet have a public comments API.

This is why you're not able to do this work in, say, Agorapulse or Sprout Social or Hootsuite. Let's hope they get that soon. On the bright side, and this is something I don't think a lot of people realize, you can do a lot of comment moderation on the TikTok website once you've logged in with your brand's account.

Look for the comments icon in the top right. It's not the most user-friendly experience, but if you're replying to a lot of comments, it's much easier than hacking it all out on your phone. All right, a handful of Twitter updates for you today. First, Twitter appears to be close to launching a kind of business account, very similar to the way Facebook added business pages. It's got a lot of the same info that Facebook pages have, a business category, an about box, a call to action button to get directions or visit the website or whatever, and a button that will start a call.

Premium newsletter subscribers can see Twitter's mock-up of this today. Interestingly, the mock-ups show a blue checkmark by default, so perhaps converting your profile to a business account automatically gets you the much-coveted checkmark. This is still early in design, and Twitter's doing a survey of brands to see what they want there. Some other options sketched out include a box near the top of the profile that can show products, or a link to an app store, and a gallery of photos. No launch date yet, but they are obviously getting close-ish. Second, Twitter says it's running a small test on mobile devices to give people an accurate preview of what an uploaded image will look like on the feed before they post that image.

Sometime last year, they announced that they'd be using my favorite kicking horse, machine learning API, to determine what the most important part of an image is and display that if the image needs a crop to fit in the feed. But, shockingly, that artificial intelligence wasn't as intelligent as they thought. In fact, even they revealed that their algorithm preferred faces of white people over faces of black people. In one case, it even cropped out the former president of the United States. So now they're testing letting us manually pick what part we want to use.

That said, the preview they showed of a vertical image appeared to render in full, like a full vertical image in the Twitter feed. Third bit of Twitter news today. The company announced it's testing a way for users to upload and view. Are you ready for this? 4K images. No, wait, it gets better. 4K images on mobile.

Like whose phone can display 4K? No, no, no, I take that back. Whose eyes can discern the detail of a 4K image on a smartphone? You might already have this in your Twitter app settings if you're in the test group. You'll also find a way to tell Twitter to not download those if you're on cellular. And finally, in Twitter news late this afternoon,

they announced that they will let you turn off the option for people to send emoji reactions and text replies to your fle fleet via DM. This is great news because DMs were a terrible place for this. Even Instagram realized this after way too long. It's on Android right now, coming to iOS soon. Tap the arrow next to the fleet button, then tap the switch to turn off allow direct messages.

All right, some other news today. Reddit wants more brands to take it seriously, and this week it announced a partnership with the Omnicom Media Group to get access to that agency's media buying shops. Clients of OMG will get support from Reddit's creative strategy team, access to training and betas, and what sounds like better analytics than the rest of us get, which is great for them because the analytics side of their ads manager is definitely their weakest spot. Quoting marketingdive.com, the pact builds on other partnerships Omnicom has struck with digital platforms as the agency giant looks to get in on the ground floor of emerging digital media channels. With the expected deprecation of audience tracking technologies like third-party cookies

and device identifiers in the near future, Reddit is leaning into its strengths in contextual-based advertising to its communities. Reddit has worked to keep pace with social media trends, including the growth in video consumption. The company in December made its first major acquisition with the purchase of Dubsmash, a short-form video-sharing social media platform. Microsoft is emailing administrators of WordPress sites, asking them to install their own Bing URLs submission plugin. This way, as soon as you publish a page or a post, it will ping their service and put it into the queue for indexing. To be honest, it's a little strange to me that this even exists as a plugin. Any webmaster who cares about their inclusion in search engines already uses a more fully

featured SEO plugin like Yoast or SmartCrawl Pro, all of which can already ping the search engines once you verify your domain. By the way, as you may know, I live stream the voicing of this podcast. And just now, one of the live stream viewers said that he has this plugin installed and he finds that it's faster submission times. I guess that makes sense. Maybe Bing is prioritizing index requests from their own plugin as opposed to third-party plugins like Yoast. Anyway, data point of one. Take that for what you will.

If you've ever thought about upgrading your digital marketing skills, getting into UX design or data analytics, Google has launched something for you. Three career certification courses. They do cost 49 bucks a month, but the company claims they are the equivalent of a four-year degree in as little as six months worth of study. To prove the point,

Google's SVP of Global Affairs has said they will treat completion of these programs the same as a four-year degree in that field. Here's the bad news. These courses are only available to U.S. citizens. If you've ever wanted to watch a business show on YouTube but can't stand the formulaic setup, or the same 10 executives blathering about how excited they are to launch version 1.1 of their API, then I have got a recommendation for you. It's called The Backpack Show. Yes, it is a business success show, but not

one like you've ever watched before. Their guests have been everything from a nun to a porn star, a Broadway actress to Sir Mix-a-Lot. My buddy Chris Brogan co-hosts it. Chris is a king on the speaking circuit. He's a New York Times best-selling author of nine books and counting. Here's a clip. One thing that's true probably in Barbadian culture as well as Chinese culture that I forgot to mention in the pre-show, by the way,

is that we honor and respect our elders. We do a lot to make sure that our parents and our grandparents are... I respect you. And so one of the ways that, oh, you. The Backpack Show is daily on YouTube. You can find it at bit.ly slash thebackpackshow. This was not an ad. And finally, a correction to a story we reported on yesterday. The beta version of Apple's market-dominant

podcasts app was only streaming shows and no longer downloading episodes. Turns out, that was a bug. The source for this story was PodNews, which today reported, quote, we've been told there is no change in automatic download behavior planned. Resetting an iPod Touch to a clean, anonymous install of iOS 14.5 confirms this. Automatic downloads are enabled in the Settings app and per podcast by default. Also, my thanks to Andrew from PodcastHero.com for sending in a voicemail about this. It's a bit technical, so I will play it at the end of today's show. By the way, you can send a voicemail in too if you want to comment on anything you hear.

Just go to todayindigital.com slash voicemail or tap the link in the episode notes. Subscribers to the premium newsletter today are getting a newsletter exclusive, a case study of a great digital marketing campaign by a snack food company that will listen to their users' microphones and turn on captioning on their computer when the extension detects that they're chewing that snack food too loudly to hear their computer. The premium newsletter contains all the content in each day's podcast, plus images, videos, related links, exclusive content, and access to premium perks, much deeper discounts than regular podcast listeners get in our free perks program. It's $5 a month, but there is a free tier that sends out a basic version of the newsletter once a week.

You can check out a sample issue at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. More than 300 digital marketers just like you are in our Slack community. Inside, you'll find exclusive deep dive episodes. Jobs get posted there, people use it to get advice, all sorts of stuff. It's free to join. Just tap the link in this episode's notes or go to todayindigital.com slash Slack. All right, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. In the March 10th, 2021 episode, you mentioned that Apple Podcasts is removing the auto-download feature, which will mean that listeners will have to stream episodes manually instead of each episode being automatically downloaded.

This will result in a reduction of podcast download stats because, as we all know, downloads are not the same thing as listens. Currently, podcasts will continue to auto-download until they are unplayed five consecutive times in the Apple Podcasts app. So, it could be an eye-opener for many podcasters when they check their stats. In your analysis, however, you mentioned that Apple will download the podcast once from the media host and cache the file and stream the episode to listeners from Apple Podcasts servers. To the best of my knowledge, this is not true. The term stream is confusing here because no podcast player uses true streaming anymore. Stitcher used to, and so did Spotify, but they've opted for media host pass-through now.

Even if you think you were streaming a podcast, what is really happening is a progressive download. I know it's a little technical, but there is a difference. Apple is not going to a streaming model as far as I know. But even if Apple did cache episodes and stream them from their servers, you would still be able to get access to the stats in Apple Podcasts Connect, where you can see even more detailed stats than are available from your media host, because player stats include listening time. And you can see at what point listeners drop off instead of just raw downloads

with some geographic and demographic information. If Apple eliminates auto-download, and they have done so already in the latest beta version of Apple Podcasts, podcasters will be getting a haircut when it comes to download numbers. Now, this may hurt the podcaster's ego, but if advertisers were

happy with their ROI on their ad spend before, perhaps they will be happy to pay a higher CPM rate in order to get the same ROI for the same ad spend. Anyways, those are my thoughts, and I also wanted to thank you for putting out great content multiple times a week. I'm not a professional digital marketer, but I consider myself a hobbyist marketer. And I find your episodes very valuable. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more.

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