Today in Digital Marketing - Confidential: ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, ever tried to hide confidential information by pixelating it? There's a new program that will see right through those. Also, YouTube busts the most common myths around its search algorithm. Lead ads on Google can now send that data to pretty much any of your existing tools. And the deadline for TikTok has passed. What next for the popular but beleaguered platform? It's Monday, December 7th, 2020. Happy birthday, 16-year-old era parent to the throne of the Netherlands

Starting point is 00:00:28 Princess Catharina Amelia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Our time has come, friends. We have taken over. No more organic content in the feeds of our potential consumers.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Nothing but ads, ads, ads, just like the good Lord intended. This is happening right now on Twitter. Sadly, it appears to be a bug. But yeah, some users reporting that their Twitter feeds have become overrun with ads. Not just any kind of ads,

Starting point is 00:00:57 but those promoted tweets ads, which like their Facebook counterpart is when you take an organic post and put a small budget behind it. Those promoted posts are supposed to appear just once at the top of a user's timeline, but now, apparently they're hitting some users every four to six tweets. And in some cases, multiple impressions for the same tweet. Twitter hasn't commented publicly on the apparent glitch, other to say they're looking into it.

Starting point is 00:01:20 Well, enjoy it while it lasts. Our work as digital marketers is largely controlled by software. Algorithms, specifically. Huge chunks of code that control when our people see our message and when they don't. Which is why, of course, we're all trying to understand every slight nuance of each platform's algo to exploit it. I'm sorry, I read that wrong. To understand it better. Now, YouTube has answered some specific questions that marketers have about their brand's video performance. Here

Starting point is 00:01:50 are some of those Q&As. First, if a video is not performing well, will updating the thumbnail improve performance? And I'll be quoting YouTube in the answers, of course. Quote, changing the way your title or thumbnail looks is a really effective way to get more views. But in general, we only recommend making changes when your video has both a lower click through rate and it's receiving fewer views and impressions than usual. When you change your title and thumbnail, you may notice that your video starts getting more or fewer views, but that's generally because your video looks different to viewers. And that's going to change the way that people interact with it when it's offered to them in recommendations, unquote.

Starting point is 00:02:29 Two, does your video's click-through rate among your channel subscribers impact the likelihood of it being recommended? Short answer, no. Quote, our recommendation system doesn't really focus on the subs feed as the primary signal. In Discovery, we focus on how well the video performs in the context that's shown. So a ranking on home for a given viewer is mostly based on how a video performs when it's shown on home. So do viewers click, watch, and enjoy the video

Starting point is 00:02:57 when it's offered to them on their homepage, unquote. Number three, if you upload several videos at once, but keep some of them as unpublished until you choose to activate them, will that reduce your video's reach? YouTube says it won't. Quote, what matters is how viewers respond to your video after it's been published. That's what a recommendation system is learning from. So if you said a video is scheduled and unlisted and you flip it to public later on, no impact. Don't worry about it. Unquote.

Starting point is 00:03:27 Anyway, there's a good piece about this on socialmediatoday.com with even more questions and their own insights. Link in this episode's transcript. Speaking of YouTube, it is expanding the capabilities of premieres. Premieres are basically a setting that you can put on an uploaded video that says to release the video at a future time, but includes a way to drum up excitement for it. Instead of just setting it to go live at a specific time, it'll show up in your subscribers lists as a kind of coming soon feature that people can get alerted to once it's out. So those new features include live redirect. This will let you host a live pre-show of sorts,

Starting point is 00:04:06 and then once it's over, your audience automatically gets dumped onto the Premiere page in time for its release. This is rolling out now over the next month. Premieres also can now have their own trailer. That's a big one, actually, if you're looking to get the hype train really moving. Trailer can be anywhere between 15 seconds and 3 minutes long. By the way, ads are not eligible to run on a trailer unless you've uploaded it as its own video on your channel.

Starting point is 00:04:30 Those are rolling out this week. There are now 10 different design themes for that countdown screen, bowing to pressure from some creators who said the current countdown didn't match their video's aesthetic. So now there are mood themes like happy, dramatic, funny, scary, and so on. These countdowns can last from one minute to 10 minutes. They will be available early next year. And finally, you can now schedule premieres on YouTube's mobile app.

Starting point is 00:04:54 Incidentally, your brand's channel has to have at least 1,000 subscribers to be able to use the live, redirect, and trailers features. YouTube says it's thinking about rolling it out to smaller channels, but that won't come until later, if at all. Google's lead form extensions are now shareable across search, YouTube, and discovery campaigns. Plus, nice little touch up for that product, you can now choose from over 50 available questions to customize the forms to your brand's needs. For example, said Google in a blog post, let's say you want to drive qualified leads for your car dealership. You can now ask questions

Starting point is 00:05:29 like what type of vehicle are you interested in? Or when do you plan on purchasing a vehicle? Unquote. You can also set up a webhook integration, which will send those leads to your CRM. But in case you don't like getting messy with code as a webhook integration often requires, Google now has added a direct connection with Zapier. Zapier is a kind of middleware that connects to hundreds and hundreds of CRMs and platforms. I cannot stress enough how big a deal this thing is. You can now run mobile-friendly pop-up lead forms as your Google ads, and when someone submits the form, their data can root into pretty much any platform you use. A CRM, Salesforce, Notion, Google Docs. Hell, you can even set Zapier to tweet out the lead form's content if you want,

Starting point is 00:06:14 but, you know, don't do that. Google updates its search engine algorithm about six times a day on average, but it does those really big updates only two about six times a day on average, but it does those really big updates only two or three times a year. We just had one of those roll out, which sent a bunch of digital marketers, maybe you, to your SEO tool to see what effect it's had. Well, if you use Google's Data Studio, someone has created a template report you can copy that can do that work for you. It uses search console data, so you've got to be hooked up with that, of course. It's from Aleda Solis. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. And

Starting point is 00:06:49 quoting from her blog post, the report is configured and pre-segmented and filtered to easily show Google Search Console's ranking evolution at a site level, as well as per query pages and country level in the last four days, which allows it to easily see if the site has been affected positively or negatively by an update and which have been the top queries, pages, and countries affected, unquote. So she's put this Data Studio report online. You can copy it pretty easily. And she's also got a nice search console dashboard in Data Studio, which you can also copy, Link in this episode's transcript.

Starting point is 00:07:32 Back at the start of the pandemic, many social and digital platforms cut their support team way back as they moved them to work from home or shifted them to more critical tasks. Google, for instance, disabled phone support for Google My Business, and that appears to be turned back on now. You should be able to find it in the Get Help section of GMB, where you will find Get a Call, Chat, and Email as your options. And one time, Google listed an actual phone number in there, but they dropped that well before the pandemic. In case you're curious, no, Facebook still has apparently not increased its support agents. Fun fact, since the pandemic started, all Facebook support requests and appeals are being handled by a 14-line basic program running on a VIC-20 programmed to deny

Starting point is 00:08:11 everything. I can't prove this, but I'm pretty sure it's accurate. Why buy just a video game from Atari or IntelliVision? Invest in the wonder computer of the 1980s for under $300, the Commodore VIC-20. We've all done it. Had to share a document with a client or prospect, but needed to obfuscate some text, like specific numbers or client names. So we pull the image into a tool like Skitch and use the handy pixelate feature there to turn that text into unreadable gray boxes of pixels. Well, those unreadable gray boxes of pixels are now readable. I ran across some code on GitHub from a programmer who has written an algorithm to decrypt pixelized text.

Starting point is 00:08:56 If you too are a programmer, here's how the developer says it works. The algorithm uses the fact that the linear box filter processes every block separately. For every block, it pixelizes all blocks in the search image to check for direct matches. For most pixelized images, it manages to find single-match results. It assumes those are correct. The matches of surrounding multi-match blocks are then compared to be geometrically at the same distance as in the pixelated image. Matches are also treated as correct. This process is repeated a couple of times.

Starting point is 00:09:26 After correct blocks have no more geometrical matches, it will output all correct blocks directly, unquote. You really have to see it. The pixelated text is completely meaningless to the human eye, but this code does manage to pull the letter shapes out of it. I tweeted what this looks like, by the way,

Starting point is 00:09:42 and the link to the GitHub code so you can find it on my Twitter account, at Todd Maffin. If you look at each of the resulting letters, they're still a little jumbled. Like in the example he posted, the capital H wasn't really clear in the decrypted version, but it's right beside a very clear E, L, L, and O. So your eye reads it as hello, perfectly fine. Honestly, it's a little frightening how good this is. Remember, it started out with completely pixelated text that I guarantee neither you nor I could figure out. So stop pixelating confidential information and start using a solid black box. Again, there's a link to the code in this episode's transcript.

Starting point is 00:10:31 Today is the day US President Donald Trump's deadline for TikTok to either be sold or get shut down. It has not been sold. In related news, it has not been shut down either. Apparently, the threat was somewhat, well, let's just say anemic in nature. TikTok remains under the ownership of Chinese-controlled ByteDance. And while the Oracle-Walmart deal is still on the table, there are apparently no talks going on. The New York Times says everyone's waiting for President-elect Joe Biden to assume the office next month and see if he really cares one way or the other. And finally, heads up fellow Canadian

Starting point is 00:11:04 digital marketers. There's a great new site out there with the latest marketing news and insights from the best digital marketers from Canada and around the world. It's a great site. You will find it at marketingnewscanada.com. Last week, if you remember, I was whining about trying to find a more organized system for our clients' information. You know, like ad campaign plans and organic content approvals and promoted post trackers and media monitoring, all that stuff. For the last 10 years, it's been a series of Google Docs. That's worked fine for a while, but we landed a couple of big global brand clients last month that we're handling their social engagement for.

Starting point is 00:11:40 And, you know, we needed something better. And I think I found it. I spent the weekend playing around with Notion. That's Notion.so. And damn if it's not actually really good. They have really nice clean pages, databases with varying views, templates. So we are spending this month moving our stuff into there

Starting point is 00:11:58 and hopefully we'll launch for our clients in the new year with a much better system. Not perfect, but pretty damn close. And then I kind of fell into a hole with it and started creating notion pages for like my favorite recipes, attractive domains I own, personal tax receipts my wife and I have gotten.

Starting point is 00:12:14 Honestly, it's starting to become a bit of an obsession. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow. You're beautiful and this feels so right My heart is full, I get lost in your eyes. You're beautiful. I've been here some time. Now I see it. I know time is right.

Starting point is 00:12:39 Unlike games, it has a real computer keyboard. With the Commodore VIC-20, the whole family can learn computing at home. Plays great games, too. Under $300, the wonder computer of the 1980s, the Commodore VIC-20. Coming soon, Commodore brings you GORF, the wonder arcade game, and Omega Race in home versions. Commodore. 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.

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Today in Digital Marketing - Confidential: ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛

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