Today in Digital Marketing - Distributed Denial of Tweets

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Friday, December 16th. Today, Google's new edition, how your SEO plans might have to change. Also, social commerce comes to connected TV, the move away from time-based agency compensation, Meta shuts down one of its competitor clones, and Elon Musk shuts down Twitter spaces because people are using it to talk about him.

Starting point is 00:00:23 I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Google has updated its search quality guidelines by adding an extra E to EAT. E-A-T. It stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Those are the metrics by which Google evaluates content.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Now they're adding experience to that. The company said experience adds another level of quality to assess its search results. So what will Google be looking for when ranking content based on EE eat? Now it'll be looking for content that demonstrates it was produced with some degree of experience, such as actual use of a product,

Starting point is 00:01:04 having actually visited a place, or communicating with an experienced person. Quoting Google, there are some situations where really what you value most is content produced by someone who has first-hand life experience on the topic at hand. For example, if you're looking for information on how to correctly fill out your tax returns, that's probably a situation where you want to see content produced by an expert in the field of accounting. But if you're looking for reviews of a tax preparation software, you might be looking for a different kind of information. Maybe it's a forum discussion from people who have experience with different services, unquote. The company added that experience, expertise, and authoritativeness are all key concepts that can support your assessment of trust,

Starting point is 00:01:49 with trust being the most significant because untrustworthy pages, says Google, have low EEAT, no matter how experienced, expert, or authoritative they may seem. The growing list of social commerce apps continues. A former executive for Amazon's Prime Video has launched a video shopping app in the beauty e-commerce space called Trendio, which will use AI to deliver targeted content across mobile and connected TV. The app features a TikTok-like feed where consumers can swipe through short previews of different products.

Starting point is 00:02:26 The platform also lets users interact with creators through their live and pre-recorded videos, pin their favorite products to dashboards, and buy items from brands within the app. The founder told TechCrunch that one of the insights that he took from Amazon Prime Video was that consumers are shifting toward connected TV. For that reason, Trendio is currently available in the U.S. on iOS, Android, and Roku. The number of women listening to podcasts is growing, and so are the brand opportunities. Women now account for half of the monthly podcast listeners in the U.S., according to a new report commissioned by the audio platform SXM Media. On top of that, more than a third of women over the age of 18 said they'd listened to a podcast in the past month.

Starting point is 00:03:15 That's about 47 million women. are more likely to consider, recommend, purchase, and spend more on brands they heard advertised on podcasts with hosts or producers who are women compared to other podcasts. Besides podcasts reaching a growing audience of women, the audience is also highly coveted. Monthly listeners tend to skew younger, podcast listeners tend to be more educated, more likely to be in the workforce, and more likely to have a higher household income. Despite the fact that those demos are prime for many advertisers, podcasts aren't necessarily thought of as top of mind for brands targeting women, according to SXM's media VP of sales research. The study polled more than 1,500 U.S. adults who identify as women. Elon Musk shut down Twitter's live audio service Spaces last night, forcing many brands to cancel their scheduled events. And it's kind of a crazy story as to why. Now,

Starting point is 00:04:15 if you couldn't care less about it, just skip to the 9 minute 20 second mark to bypass this. Premium members just need to tap the next story. The drama starts with that college kid who set up a Twitter account that reposted the publicly available flight data of Elon Musk's jet. Before Musk owned the platform, he offered the kid $5,000 to take it down, and the kid said no. When Musk bought Twitter, he said he was so committed to free speech that he wouldn't even take the account down.

Starting point is 00:04:41 Well, that commitment lasted about a month, as this week Musk permanently banned the account, saying the account was giving out his location without his permission, something it wasn't doing, and honestly, it was a bit of a rich claim considering reports that Twitter plans to require users to disclose their precise location in order to continue using the app, but whatever. That's when things got messy. The about face was covered by journalists reporting that Musk had banned the Jet account. Then, last night, the accounts of many of those journalists were also permanently banned. Journalists from major news organizations like

Starting point is 00:05:17 the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN. Last night, some reporters set up a Twitter space to chat about the day's events, where they discovered that those journalists who were permanently banned that day actually were still able to join and participate in the space. Then, Elon Musk himself shows up in the space, claims that the reporters were banned because they doxed him, which by any standard wasn't true. Then, when one of those reporters asked him a question about the bans, Musk hung up.

Starting point is 00:05:44 About 15 minutes later, the Twitter space mysteriously and abruptly stopped. Even though it was being recorded, the recording was also gone. People started realizing that not only was that space down, but the entire Twitter spaces platform was gone. You couldn't join any. You couldn't start any, you couldn't listen to any past spaces. By this morning, even the icon in the app that sends you to that section had disappeared. Musk himself confirmed that he had pulled the plug on the entire platform, citing what he called a legacy bug. He didn't say what the bug was, or why they chose to fix it by taking it entirely offline, or why they didn't fix it earlier. It's speculated that Musk didn't say what the bug was, or why they chose to fix it by taking it entirely offline,

Starting point is 00:06:26 or why they didn't fix it earlier. It's speculated that Musk didn't like that banned accounts can still participate in spaces, but honestly, who knows? And that is when Musk appeared to go off the rails. First, the reporter who started that space he got so pissy about works for BuzzFeed. She reported last night that Twitter's email servers now block any emails from their domain from getting into the company. Then, Musk puts up a poll, asking people when he should unsuspend the accounts he banned. When the poll starts showing most people voting for an immediate reversal, Musk cancels the poll, saying there are too many poll options. He redoes it, and even a higher percentage

Starting point is 00:07:05 vote for the accounts to be unbanned. So far, not only are those accounts still banned, this morning even more journalists were getting removed from the platform. One of them, a reporter who published an investigation of Tesla and documented the times Musk had his enemies tracked. Many of those reporters migrated to Mastodon last night. So, guess what happened? First, Mastodon's Twitter account was permanently banned. Then, users discovered that they couldn't post links to their Mastodon accounts at all, or add their Mastodon account handles to their Twitter bios. Twitter's even now blocking links to pixel-fed servers, which are just Instagram clones but use the same independent server setup as Mastodon

Starting point is 00:07:48 Side note here, you might be asking, sure, but how's Twitter Blue going? Well, a new analysis has found that 15 of the top 20 Twitter Blue subscribers, as measured by follower count, are porn accounts Despite all this going down, something that is perhaps one of the biggest social media scandals in months, Twitter's trending section, at the time I wrote this, showed a video game, the TV show Criminal Minds, and a hashtag about Donald Trump's run for the presidency. Late this morning, Bloomberg reported that Spaces was back up, except not for anyone who attended that train wreck of a space last night. If you were listening in on that space, as I was, you're still banned from spaces, as I seem to be.

Starting point is 00:08:33 In the end, Elon might be right after all. Last night he tweeted, Twitter right now is on fire. Indeed it is, Elon. 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. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca.

Starting point is 00:09:10 Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. While labor-based fees remain the most common form of ad agency compensation, more agencies are using fixed or output-based fees, according to a new study by the Association of National Advertisers. With a fixed model, advertisers determine the price for a specific project or set of deliverables, compared to calculating payment based on how much time an agency spends working on a project. The study found that the majority of marketers that spend $500 million or more per year now employ fixed or output-based fees up nearly 50% from 2016. The report suggests a couple of reasons for the shift. According to that report, quote,

Starting point is 00:10:01 one likely reason for a switch from labor-based to fixed or output-based fees relates to greater administrative efficiency. Because the fees are based on outputs, there's no review or haggling over agency labor time. The second reason is more philosophic and may relate to marketers who want to compensate the agency for what they produce, not the time it takes to produce it. Another one of Meta's experiments is dust in the wind. Yesterday, the company announced that Super, that's its Cameo-inspired app, will be no more as of February 15th. While it won't pull the plug on the app until February,

Starting point is 00:10:38 users won't be able to create a new event during the shutdown period. If users have an upcoming scheduled event during this window, the company recommends the event be rescheduled on another platform. Meta added that users who participated in a super event or hosted one can download their recorded media before it heads to the Meta graveyard. And finally, Reddit has announced a couple of changes to its app yesterday. First, a new latest feed was added to the drop down menu, which will let users view their homepage in reverse chronological order. And also, somewhat controversially, the platform is removing a whole bunch of other home feed sort controls and defaulting home to the sort they call best.

Starting point is 00:11:20 The company said its research indicated that 99% of Redditors use either Best or New. Feed updates are currently rolling out to iOS users and will be released to Android users in the new year. If this podcast is on your daily must-listen list, you might benefit from upgrading your listening experience. Thank you. Tap the link in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash premium. And that will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Production coordination by Sarah Guild. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle.

Starting point is 00:12:23 And not many people know this, but our theme composer, Mark Blevis, is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. So of course, he too was banned by Elon Musk last night. Luckily though, Mark had downloaded all of his tweets, even printed them out for safekeeping. That's when he realized his tweets weren't very good. He told me this morning,

Starting point is 00:12:44 crumpled bits of paper filled with imperfect thought, That's when he realized his tweets weren't very good. He told me this morning, crumpled bits of paper filled with imperfect thought, stilted conversations. I'm afraid that's all we've got. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - Distributed Denial of Tweets

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