Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 12 — Two words: Blockbuster Video (Ep 213)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, a huge update for WordPress that could improve your brand's Google ranking. Pinterest adds to its AR marketing platform, announces a big video partnership and gets sued. And one of the best experiential marketing campaigns of the year from, you ready for this? Blockbuster Video. It's Wednesday, August 12th, 2020. Happy World Elephant Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. It's Wednesday, August 12th, 2020. Happy World Elephant Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:32 And we're going to start today with a quiz. As you probably know, you can disavow website links. This means that if some shady website has a link to your brand site, you can tell the search engines to ignore it, not to consider that shady site as being in any way connected to yours. But if it's your site that someone else is disavowing, in other words, if some other website is saying that links from your brand's site should be ignored, what effect does that have on your brand's Google ranking? A, it has no effect. B, Google will penalize your listing and move you lower in the results. Or C, your ranking won't change, but you will no longer appear

Starting point is 00:01:12 in knowledge graph or answer boxes. The answer at the end of today's episode. A big update for WordPress today. Version 5.5 came out this morning, and it includes two big changes that have the potential to rank your brand's website higher in the search engines. First, pages and posts could load faster, since this version now displays images using lazy load.

Starting point is 00:01:39 That's the industry term for when the image doesn't actually render on the page until it's visible in the display. Faster page loads times. As I'm sure you know, faster page load times translate directly to better search engine ranking. And second, WordPress now generates a sitemap XML file automatically. This file is what the search engines look for to index your site. Until now, you've needed a plugin like Yoast to generate these. A couple of other nice changes.

Starting point is 00:02:08 You can now set plugins and themes to update automatically if you want. There are now mini templates of blocks that let you create more complex layouts, like three buttons across or two columns of text. And you can crop, rotate, and zoom images from directly inside the image block. But should you update your brand's website? Honestly, I would wait until version 5.5.1, in other words, the first patch. These big releases have a way of being a little buggy,

Starting point is 00:02:34 so you wouldn't want your brand's website to go down. Also, hopefully your site is on a server that makes a full copy of it prior to any upgrade so you can roll it back if something goes wrong. I'm sure you know when you run a digital ad campaign, you can target certain countries. Or if you're a global brand, maybe you target the whole world, but exclude a handful of countries. But until now, that ability hasn't extended as easily to e-commerce. That's changing, at least on Google's Merchant Center,

Starting point is 00:03:07 which this week added a new technical attribute that you can use to exclude some or all of your products from displaying in specific countries. How do you use it? Pop the tag into your product feeds, and Google will take care of the rest. Quoting the company, let's say you select Germany as your primary country of sale and Austria and Switzerland as additional countries of sale

Starting point is 00:03:26 when you submit your product data in Merchant Center. If you later decide that you don't want to advertise a particular product in Austria and Switzerland, you can use this attribute to stop the product from showing there while still allowing it to show in Germany, unquote. So, small feature, but an important one for those brands that have that specific use case. One of the things that got a lot of attention when the pandemic lockdown started

Starting point is 00:03:53 was the video conferencing tool Zoom. It didn't take long for people to realize that Zoom had a fun, unique little feature in it, the ability to replace your background with any image or looping video. If you haven't seen it, it will carve your image out, like as if you had a green screen, and pop it on top of a background. Well, now the Facebook-owned Jiffy.com is getting in on the action and has created a mini site full of animated GIFs that it thinks are perfect as Zoom backdrops. Honestly, most of them are what you'd expect from Jiffy. Flashy, colorful, a little gaudy. But some are pretty

Starting point is 00:04:28 clever. Maybe even a tad political. One of the backdrops available, an animated version of the Oval Office in the style of South Park. But there's a Black Lives Matter sign on the table. Oh, and an executive order titled Build Bridges Not Walls.

Starting point is 00:04:44 Oh, and an LGBTQ pride titled Build Bridges, Not Walls. Oh, and an LGBTQ pride flag and a trans pride flag. You can find all of them at jiffy.com slash backdrop. Pinterest today upgraded their augmented reality marketing tools. These are mostly used for beauty products to let people virtually try on lipstick and blush and the likes. The main upgrade, more range in skin tone, and it's available in more countries than the US now. They've added the UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Side note here, why is this getting rolled out by country? It's not like there are rights issues or licensing issues here. This isn't music. And I can't imagine the volume of traffic on these tools is so huge they have to stage it out. Anyway, also the video platform Vimeo.com today announced

Starting point is 00:05:32 that they have created a direct publishing tool for Pinterest. You can use their create tool now to make short videos and post them as a pin right on Pinterest. One of the important considerations Pinterest said in this announcement, don't worry too much about the voiceover or audio track. Apparently, the majority of people who visit Pinterest do so with their sound off. It wasn't all good news for the company. Its former chief operating officer just yesterday filed a lawsuit against Pinterest, accusing the company of gender discrimination. Most of us digital marketers spend our time working the consumer platforms like Pinterest or Facebook or Twitter and so on. But there are lots of marketers in the B2B space, and for them, LinkedIn is the place to be.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Frankly, there are lots of us that should be on LinkedIn. Hell, our agency here needs to do a better job on LinkedIn. And if that's you too, you might be interested in a free conference all about LinkedIn marketing. It's being put on by the social media platform Agora Pulse. I'll be honest, I generally stay away from these online summits. Often the presenters spend as much time promoting their online course as they do dribbling out pretty basic tips. But Agora Pulse does have a rep for decent content. Their social media lab, which tests hypotheses in the digital ad market, is always a must-read for

Starting point is 00:06:51 me. Their LinkedIn summit happens two weeks from today. There are 27 sessions, prizes, even a virtual after-party. You can register at summit.agorapulse.com. That link is also in this episode's notes. Full disclosure, the company has given me a complimentary account for review purposes. We do not use that account at our agency for our client work. They did not pay for this mention. And a couple of tiny items, so tiny that I am too lazy to drop the lightning round music in. First, LinkedIn has sold off its SlideShare service.

Starting point is 00:07:25 It's gone to Scribd.com, S-C-R-I-B-D.com. I don't know how to pronounce that, which does very similar stuff. The takeover formally happens September 24th. And it looks like Facebook is testing the ability for group admins to see analytics at the post level. People in the testing group are reporting seeing insights buttons below posts in their group. And finally, a couple of years ago, I was keynoting a tourism conference in Bend, Oregon.

Starting point is 00:07:55 I had some time to kill, so I dropped by the local Blockbuster. Yes, Blockbuster, the video store. It was the last Blockbuster in the world, and now it's closing too. But not without doing a really smart experiential marketing campaign. They are going to convert it into an Airbnb. Not permanently. I don't mean they're tearing it down and building some condos. I mean, you'll be able to book a night and stay inside the store overnight. They've put in a pull-out sofa, beanbag chairs, a TV, coffee table, and a VHS machine in the middle of it. And you can just walk around, pick out any movie, and watch them all night long. It's only locals

Starting point is 00:08:38 who can book this. Coronavirus, community transmission risks and all. But the price? Just four bucks. Oh, and the answer to the quiz at the top. What happens to your brand's website in Google if some other site disavows a link that you've made to them? The answer? Not a thing. Google's John Mueller tweeting this week, quote, A few people online mentioned, with zero evidence but citing a hunch, that Google will monitor sites that use a disavow file more closely,

Starting point is 00:09:12 as it's an admission of guilt, I guess. That's not correct. And we've said so in the past. You can use a disavow file for different reasons, and regardless, cleaning things up should never be considered a bad thing. So day two of the voicing booth. I had a listen to yesterday's show. It's better than the Echoey office, that's for sure. There's some booming around, I don't know, maybe 200 hertz or so that I'm not happy with, so I spent like three hours on YouTube last night learning all about bass traps and the acoustical difference between four-inch tiles and two-inch tiles. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking

Starting point is 00:09:51 this. Does it sound okay to you? Does it sound any better? Does it sound worse? Tweet me maybe, let me know, please. Our Slack community is growing fast, more than two dozen people in so far, all digital marketing professionals. It's a good group to pick brains or have your brain picked. I also post sneak peeks of each episode in there and starting next week exclusive longer form content that you will only get in the Slack community

Starting point is 00:10:16 it's free forever and if you want to join us just go to todayindigital.com slash slack or tap the link in today's episode notes as always full transcripts to each episode are on the site, todayindigital.com, and follow me on social media. All my links are in the notes.

Starting point is 00:10:32 I'm Todd Maffin. Talk to you tomorrow. about a man. Now let's go and get this money, boy. I think I got the plan. Let's hop off the ride. She want to have some fun. I told her, hop in the sky.

Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 12 — Two words: Blockbuster Video (Ep 213)

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