Today in Digital Marketing - 🎵 Do You Remember... How the Stars Stole the Night Away?

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

Does hosting your brand’s web site on a shared server negatively affect your Google position? Facebook adds new intellectual property protection for brands…. Amazon adds a whole new placement — and it’s a big one… And you blew it. Your brand could have owned today — every year, you could have owned this day. But you don’t. Because you blew it. Not subscribed yet? Get direct subscribe links at TodayInDigital.com HELP SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Produced by: engageQ.com • Advertising: TodayInDigital.com/ads • Our Slack community: TodayInDigital.com/slack • Transcripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio) TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffin • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Tod’s agency: engageQ.com • TikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin Source links and full transcripts at TodayInDigital.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, does hosting your brand's website on a shared server negatively affect your Google position? Facebook adds a new intellectual property protection system for brands. Amazon adds a whole new placement, and it's a big one. And you blew it. Your brand could have owned today. Every year you could have owned this day. But you don't, because you blew it.

It's Monday, 21st night of September. Love is changing the mind of pretenders. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start with the most important digital marketing news of the year, at least for you social media community managers, the release of new emoji. I'm only partly kidding here. Emoji are becoming an actual thing you've got to think about these days when it comes to your social posts, email newsletters, and all that. Anyway, there are a handful of new ones, like a face exhaling, a heart on fire,

a heart with a bandage over it, some faces with more beard options, but the vast majority, 200, of the more than 217 new emoji approved by Unicode are more skin tone options for those two-person couple emoji. Until now, those icons have only been available in yellow. Now there are a variety of skin tones and genders. For better or worse, some stability is coming to the Facebook ad auction. Sadly, not stability in their platform.

That's still a roaring shit show, but rather prices in the auction. Marketing Pulse tracks CPMs across all four of Facebook's main placements. That's Facebook mobile, Facebook desktop, Instagram feed, and Instagram stories. And the volatility has been leveling off a bit. The massive swings in CPM that we were seeing in the past few months or so are beginning to even out. That said, their data is about a week behind and are, of course, broad averages. Some people are still seeing lots of crazy behavior. One poor digital marketer in our Slack community, a guy named Jay

Hall, last week reported, we launched a real estate clients contest last week with a local $600 budget to start. Three clicks later, the entire budget was spent with only one contest submission through the lead forms. And I thought I didn't understand him. So I replied saying, wait, you got one conversion and three clicks and that costs $600?

Jay replied, that is correct. One rep told us an hour ago that, quote, fluctuations in demand. I'm sure you know the rest, unquote. What's that? You're not in our Slack yet? What are you waiting for? Go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or tap the link in this episode's notes. It is free to join. So you are a small brand.

Maybe it's just you and your website is hosted on a shared server. It's your site and a few dozen others, maybe even a few hundred others. You chose that because it's much cheaper than having your own dedicated server. But is your Google ranking being pushed down just because you're using a shared server? A British digital agency says it's found a connection, and not because those sites are generally slower, but because those servers often attract low-quality or spammy websites, and Google, they say, penalizes everyone on the server. To test it, they made up a word,

a word that doesn't exist anywhere on Google. And they found, quote, cheap shared hosting options can in fact have a detrimental effect on the organic performance and rankings of the websites hosted there if your website ends up being hosted alongside lower quality and potentially spammy ones, unquote. But not everyone is convinced. Many industry analysts pointed out that they couched their language in the study with phrases like could very well, which, you know, isn't really conclusive at all. What does Google say? They flat out deny it. With analyst John Mueller saying the research was flawed

right from the creation of that fake test website and the ranking algorithm doesn't take IP addresses into account anyway. He said, quote, Artificial websites like this are pretty much never indicative of any particular effect in normal Google search. It's a cool experiment, a good write-up and analysis, and I love it when people experiment like this, but it's not useful data. Unquote. I'm sure you know the major platforms like Facebook and YouTube have bots that crawl uploaded content looking for copyright infringement. Upload a video that contains music you haven't licensed and your video might get muted or taken down. Until now, that technology has been limited to audio and video. That's about to change.

Facebook announcing today it will soon start scanning for infringement of images as well. So if you own brand imagery that you'd like to protect, you'll be able to upload it to the rights manager in Creator Studio. And if its image matching technology finds your image out there, it can whack it back. You can also claim ownership globally or just in certain jurisdictions. If you can even access Rights Manager, that is. When I went to look at it, only one of our pages under our control showed a page that has been closed for more than two years now. Why? Because Facebook. Twitch recently started pushing mid-rolls into live streams, much to the chagrin of the streamers and users. Amazon is the world's largest advertiser

and wants to become the world's biggest ad platform. This is certainly a step toward that goal. An interesting leak from the Twitter code suggests they're working on some kind of audio or podcast or listening feature called audio space. When Twitter user found the code, it seems to be a kind of virtual room where you can talk to people, maybe? Or like the recently added tweet reply controls where you can talk to the people you follow or mention. So maybe like chat roulette, but for audio? It's not really clear,

and Twitter of course hasn't said anything about it, but it will be interesting to see if this comes to fruition in the weeks and months ahead. The Emmys were handed out last night. I've got to say, even considering the nominees were at home behind webcams, it was a pretty entertaining show, and not only because Jennifer Aniston

nearly lit the stage on fire. Now this is exciting. We are delivering Emmys live to some of the winning nominees in their homes. But one win in particular was absolutely compelling. It was for the best television ad. Here's how it starts. This year, my mom got me the perfect bag for back to school.

These colorful binders help me stay organized. These headphones are just what I need for studying. These new sneakers are just what I need for the new year. As he's saying this, behind him, kids start running in a panic down the hall. A girl uses a pair of socks as a tourniquet on a child who's been shot. These new socks? They can be a real lifesaver. And the final scene, a girl hiding in a bathroom,

texting, I love you, Mom, and delivers the line. And I finally got my own phone to stay in touch with my mom. All with a phony Sears catalog marketing-friendly smile on her face. Fade to black, and the text, It's back to school week, and you know what that means. I have to say, it's an incredible ad. It was for the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation, created by BBDO New York. There's a link in the Late Late Show and the NBC series The Good Place, but he is more widely known as the September 21st guy. Every year on this date

for the past five years, he's done a short and super funny and super creative video always set to the tune September by Earth, Wind & Fire. Sometimes it's just him dancing. One year, he hired a bunch of kids to dance with him while he set off these little tube firecrackers. I'm not going to spoil this year's. Suffice to say, it is worth watching on a big desktop-sized screen. Link in the transcript. But I will say this.

Every digital marketer, every single one of us, should be ashamed of ourselves for not thinking of doing this for our brand. His video last year, 1.6 million views. This year, he asked people to donate to a charity. This morning, minutes after he released the video, the charity website crashed. Some brands do have annual viral videos they do every year. The Canadian airline WestJet does one every Christmas that's

always really quite strong. One year they asked families getting on a flight from Toronto to Calgary what they wanted for Christmas. Hello there! Is that Cohen? What are you looking for Christmas this year, Cohen?

A choo-choo train? And while those people were in flight, WestJet staff members in Calgary raced to malls and bought them those things. It was a great rush to get all those presents. Not a moment to spare. Raced back to the airport, wrapped them. The conveyor belt turned on and the gifts started coming out. No way!

That's so huge, sir! And look, I know I cry easily, okay? I'm a pushover. The last episode of Lost, I bawled my eyes out for three hours. I get it. I am not the best judge of these things. But I challenge you to watch this and not missed up even a little. The editing on this piece is so deliciously emotionally manipulative. And I absolutely mean that as a compliment to the video editor.

So WestJet owns Christmas in Canada, and Demi Adidjouibé owns September 21st. And it could have been yours. Special thanks to the Canadian listener with the username CDNHandler who reviewed the show on Apple Podcasts saying, Todd's insights and personal opinions are always worth a listen. He knows what he's talking about. Thank you for that. Not 100% sure that's always true, but I'll take it.

And if you're getting value from this daily news podcast, please consider rating and reviewing the show. It really does help. There's a link in this episode's description that makes that a simple one-click process. I'm Todd Maffin. More breaking news from the world of digital marketing tomorrow. Talk to you then.