Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 21 — Fake Skyscrapers and Your Facebook Page (Ep 220)

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Today, what does a fake skyscraper have to do with your brand's presence on Facebook? Why are hundreds of video game streamers mad at Burger King this morning? How do you get a formerly dead page of yours back into Google's index? And how can you get access to the Twitter firehose for a reasonable price? Answers to all those questions and more today, Friday, August 21st. Happy National Senior Citizens Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital,

Starting point is 00:01:05 and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. As I'm sure you know, Facebook brand pages have a lot of detail you can put in about your company on your About page. If you have a bricks and mortar location, you can put your address there, and Facebook will generate a map for you. And you might think that Facebook licenses a big mapping service from Google or Bing, and you would be wrong. Instead, and this surprised the hell out of me when I discovered this, they actually use an open source service called OpenStreetMap. It's a lot like Wikipedia. Anyone can edit it. I discovered this when a client of ours asked, why is Facebook

Starting point is 00:01:44 showing our location as being like four or five blocks away? And sure enough, their address was right. And the map service did know where their address was. But still, it stuck that location pin in completely the wrong place. And it's not just Facebook that uses this open source service. Take Microsoft's newest flight simulator game that came out Tuesday. People flying around Melbourne, Australia found a gigantic 212-story skyscraper there. To put that in context, that's more than twice as high as One World Trade Center. And if it were real, would make it the tallest building in the world by far. But it's not real.

Starting point is 00:02:21 It's actually a typo. A typo in OpenStreetMaps, where a user named NathanWright120 edited the data on a house a year or two ago. He meant to type 2. Instead, he typed 212. And now we have a 212-story skyscraper. So there are lots of gamers flying around it today trying to land on it before it gets patched out of the game. As for you and your brand page, you should probably go check that map of your location right now on your Facebook page. Do not rely on checking the address that you gave it. If you find a mistake like we did for our client, you can make a note in the map for the volunteer editors. We did that a couple of months ago.

Starting point is 00:03:02 I just checked that client's location and they did indeed move that little location pin. Problem is, they moved it even further away from the client's actual location. Like I say, check your map now. Well, while some gamers are checking out this massive skyscraper, a whole bunch more this morning were embroiled in the aftermath of a digital marketing campaign that appears to have gone off the rails. Streamers on the website Twitch play video games live for people to watch. Part of how they make money is through direct donations from viewers. Here's how it works.

Starting point is 00:03:41 The viewer clicks on a link on the streamer's page that takes them to a donation form. On that page is how much they want to give and a field for the message you want to send along with that donation. Many streamers then use a text-to-speech system to automatically read out the donation message. For instance, one of the streamers that I watch is called Summit1G. There is this running joke among his fans that he has a big head, which for the record, he doesn't. But sometimes when people donate to him, they use that message to send along a little poke. I really wanted to thank you since you made me flunk out of high school years ago. You sat in front of me and I could never see the board.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Which brings us to this morning's digital marketing campaign. A few weeks back, Burger King's ad agency, Ogilvy, went around to a bunch of streamers channels and donated some money. Not a lot, just three or four bucks. You know, enough to buy a burger and fries deal. And they used that text to speech function to plug that burger and fry deal. Go to the closest Burger King drive-thru and get a great deal with the $3 I just donated. Have you already thought about the mini shake at Burger King for $1? You're making me hungry if that's what the point you're trying to make.

Starting point is 00:04:57 And then, as you might expect, they put a bunch of clips of streamers reacting to that donation into a compilation video ad and tweeted it out this morning. But here's the problem. They didn't get these streamers' permission. So to get around that, they just blurred out faces and put a voice changer on people, but regular viewers will 100% be able to recognize them. Not to mention this may have even violated the American FTC regulations on disclosure of advertising.

Starting point is 00:05:25 But either way, it's a little scummy. One longtime streamer who goes by the name Ann Munition said this kind of advertising by cheap donation happens to her every month or so. A company will just donate to get their brand name in front of viewers, which can sometimes be tens of thousands of people. That kind of advertising is available with almost all these professional streamers if you get a sponsorship deal with them, of course, which is worth more than a $5 donation. Even in Ogilvy's video,

Starting point is 00:05:54 you can hear one streamer get pissed off about it. I have donated $5 so I can say that on the Burger King app you can get a Whopper, a small French fries, and small drink for $5. Listen, are you going to sponsor me or not? As one streamer said, this is so tacky and unprofessional.

Starting point is 00:06:12 Hard pass on this shit. $5 to promote your multi-million dollar franchise? A slap in the face at best. A bit of advice from Google on what to do with a formerly dead URL that isn't getting into their index. This happens from time to time. You had a blog post on your website or an important web page at a specific URL, and then for whatever reason it was removed. So your web server, of course, put up a 404 file not found error in its place. When Google saw the 404,

Starting point is 00:06:46 it removed your page from its index. The problem comes when you put that page back. Google isn't likely to check in on it during its regular sweep of your site because your server told it it doesn't exist anymore. What to do? Google's John Mueller yesterday said, if you're having huge difficulty getting content that was previously 404'd or no indexed back into Google's index, make a new URL for that content and 301 that old URL to it. 301 is a redirect.

Starting point is 00:07:19 I know I'm speaking mostly to the hardcore nerds here at the moment. He also suggests forcing Google to recrawl it using the URL inspection tool in Search Console and be sure it's listed in your sitemap XML. The content aggregator Feedly has added Twitter as a source. Feedly started life as an RSS reader, but has grown to include other sources like Google Alerts, Reddit, and so on. This Twitter integration is actually quite useful for digital marketers, and here's why.

Starting point is 00:07:49 Unlike a lot of other platforms, access to Twitter's live stream of all tweets, something they call the firehose, is actually quite expensive. This is why third-party platforms that offer it are usually pretty highly priced. But Feedly has thrown it into their Pro Plus plan, which is 99 bucks US per year. That's actually a pretty decent price for this kind of access. You can follow hashtags and keyword searches, searches that you can customize to the hilt with and or not operators. They even have an AI content engine that prioritizes or mutes certain topics related to your industry.

Starting point is 00:08:25 And you can tell it to only service tweets with links in them or filter out retweets. Lots of ways a digital marketer could use this. Market research, of course. You might run a search for the hashtag B2B marketing and a keyword of your industry. Or you could track mentions of your competitors. They're at feedly.com. Again, you do need their ProPlus plan. But this is a pretty good price for access to the Twitter firehose.

Starting point is 00:08:52 Which brings us to a Friday lightning round. Squarespace can now show data from Google Search Console within its dashboard. You should be able to find queries, clicks, and impressions at page level in the updated search keywords panel. Facebook's chief marketing officer is leaving. Antonio Lucio only spent two years in the job, saying now he wants to dedicate 100% of his time to diversity efforts in the marketing industry. Bloomberg this morning reported that Google's parent, Alphabet, thought about being part of a group bid for TikTok, but apparently they dropped the idea in the last couple of days. And the big losers from the pandemic, at least in the U.S., small businesses.

Starting point is 00:09:32 21% of American small businesses have closed because of the pandemic. The rest, revenue was down an average of 30%. Meanwhile, Amazon profits are up 100%, Walmart up 80%, Target up 80%, Lowe's up 74%, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and Google, all their stocks at record highs.

Starting point is 00:10:00 But the voicing booth got a big upgrade today. Actual real power. Not just battery-powered LED lights that I had glued to the wall. No, a real electrician came, gave me a real switch in the wall, a real light in the ceiling, a power outlet in the booth, and best of all, my on-air light is back in operation. Feels good, man. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, music licensing by Source Audio,

Starting point is 00:10:24 ad management by Podcorn, and this podcast is produced by our agency, EngageQ Digital. Check us out at engageq.com. Don't forget to join our Slack community where you will find exclusive long-form audio content. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or click the link in today's episode notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. I'll talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - Aug 21 — Fake Skyscrapers and Your Facebook Page (Ep 220)

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