Today in Digital Marketing - Don't Underestimate a Man With a Plan, and a Beer in One Hand.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, Twitter's new monetization features are bombing. Be protected. Be Zen. and one take. It's Friday, September 17th, 2021. Happy Citizenship Day, Australia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 470. And before we get started, a quick note, we are hiring. We are looking for a half-time associate producer to work with us on story development, scripting, guest expert booking, community management, and even occasional guest hosting. More details at todayindigital.com slash job. And that link is in today's episode notes.

Starting point is 00:01:16 It's the summer of 2013, and executives at Twitter have just made a fateful decision. A hard decision. One that changed internet culture at the time, though today it's been largely forgotten. That decision? They retired the whale. In Twitter's early days, the platform would crash so frequently,

Starting point is 00:01:36 all you could get on their website was an image of a whale with the message, Twitter is over capacity. It became known as the fail whale. It wasn't just Twitter. Crashes happened all the time. Since then, software engineering has gotten more robust, so there are fewer outages among

Starting point is 00:01:53 the social media platforms. But they do happen. Which brings us to the Friday Quiz. What social media platform has had the most outages in the last 12 months? Here's a hint. It's not Twitter. The answer later in today's episode. Incidentally, the whale may be gone, but Twitter's downtime isn't. Just this afternoon, they reported their APIs and developer portal were both down for some people. Twitter's platform may not be crashing as much, but their most recent

Starting point is 00:02:29 feature isn't exactly blowing the doors wide open. Their creator platform, Super Follows, which they launched just three weeks ago, has generated a little more than $6,000 in total revenue on Apple devices in the US. In Canada, it's made a whole $600 in total. Oh, and that number includes revenue from their Twitter Blue subscription package. The data is from Sensor Tower. Super Follows is kind of like a sub on Twitch or joining as a channel member on YouTube, that sort of thing. Users pay between $3 and $10 a month for access to private tweets. One potential issue is they're picking and choosing who can be on the selling side of those. Most people who apply are turned down. That said, the number of people who can buy is not limited.

Starting point is 00:03:20 Any iOS user in the US or Canada can super follow any number of accounts with it on. In the US, Twitter has 37 million monetizable daily active users. And yes, only a portion of those will be iOS users. But come on, that's still millions and millions of people. Digital marketers were indeed watching super follows as a potential path to a new revenue center. Looks like the good money is on keep watching. Twitter's take on this? They did not refute the numbers, but said it's still too early to make any decisions on it.

Starting point is 00:03:55 If you are a retail marketer and looking for a way to differentiate yourself, consider this move that IKEA is making, buying their products back. They're testing this in one US store right now. The idea is that if you've used their stuff and it's not damaged, they'll buy it back from you when you're tired of it. To be clear, this is quite different than a refund for product quality issues. This program will take your couch or bookshelf years after you bought it and give you a portion of your purchase price for it. There are, of course, some catches. First, you need to be part of its free-to-join loyalty program. The items need to only be gently used. You can't trash them, then expect them to take it.

Starting point is 00:04:34 And it has to come back fully assembled, functional, and not subject to any safety recall. What IKEA is doing is jumping on the concept of a circular business, which it says it plans to fully embrace within nine years. It says once it reviews the data from this test, they plan to add more cities and eventually make it a fixture of all American stores. It's something they've been doing already in some European countries for the last couple of years. Facebook has added some new video tools into Facebook Business Suite, Vimeo Create. Vimeo is a premium video platform. They have their own set of tools they sell as a plug-in to other platforms, kind of like how you sometimes see mini versions of Canva in other social media tools.

Starting point is 00:05:19 Vimeo Create is a paid tool, though, so this really is meant more for people with existing Vimeo Create is a paid tool, though, so this really is meant more for people with existing Vimeo accounts to make some quick edits prior to sending a video into an ad campaign or asset library. The tool is also inside Pinterest and TikTok. With the announcement, Facebook offered three tips to marketers wanting to up their video game, quoting socialmediatoday.com. One, capture attention within the first few seconds. With users scrolling by quickly, you need to grab attention, and the first seconds of your clip are critical in this. Facebook also notes that custom thumbnails can play a role here.

Starting point is 00:05:55 Two, repurpose your creative assets. Vimeo Create enables you to change the ratio of your video so you can convert assets into 9x16 for Instagram stories or 1 to 1 for Facebook ads while you can also edit, trim and plug in different product shots. This can be particularly beneficial for creative split testing

Starting point is 00:06:16 as you can easily chop and change elements in the app and test and optimize which leads to the final point. You can use Facebook Business Suite to monitor performance of your video ads to easily see which video is performing best. Integrating the two elements then streamlines this process and facilitates more capacity for trialing different creative elements.

Starting point is 00:06:42 TikTok is limiting the searchability of a specific hashtag after it was found to be encouraging kids to steal. It's part of a viral TikTok trend happening now, one of many that pops up on the platform. But this one encourages students to steal small items from their classrooms. Things like COVID test kits, soap dispensers, even school technology. TechCrunch reports, quote, at a middle school in Las Vegas, school administrators report students swiping speed limit signs, fire alarms, soap dispensers, and classroom projectors. And in Portland, Oregon, at least one high school saw an entire building's worth of soap dispensers go missing. Not a great start to another school year in the throes of a global pandemic, unquote. By Monday of this week, the hashtag in question, devious lick, had amassed more than 175 million views.

Starting point is 00:07:38 So, two days ago, TikTok limited searching for it, removed videos with the tag, and encouraged students to be kinder to their teachers. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. As digital marketers, we like data. Lots of it. Some of us spend millions to get detailed market research, and the providers of that research spend a lot of time trying to ensure their methodology is sound and they've removed as much bias as they can.

Starting point is 00:08:31 But a new study has found there may still be a long way to go. Quoting MediaPost.com, The accuracy problem is growing more acute because of fundamental changes in society. The rise of blended families and multicultural households make their characterization more challenging. The increasing diversity of neighborhoods makes it harder to assign demo attributes based upon geography. Geotargeting is further undermined by the increasing tendency of younger consumers to move around. Additionally, ad blockers and more stringent privacy requirements make less reliable the identifiers used to ascribe characteristics to records in many commercial databases, unquote. The group says the marketing industry should require data providers to show the composition of segments they use and the date ranges when that data was compiled, and those providers Again, Media Post, quote, Lack of representation could negatively impact ratings for Spanish language programming, leading it to be undercounted, resulting in reduced rates and advertising. Ultimately, the undercounting of racial minorities leads to marketers not investing in them.

Starting point is 00:10:16 It robs these powers of economic power and the power to guide industry to produce products and programming reflective of their needs. The marketing industry has made significant commitments to increasing investment for minority-owned businesses and media companies. Those efforts are critical and are to be applauded, but failure to increase investment in more diverse representation in market research will reduce the impact and effectiveness of all other diversity initiatives. Let's briefly get back to the Friday quiz. Which social media platform had the worst

Starting point is 00:10:53 track record for uptime in the last 12 months? If you guessed Instagram, 10 points to you. In fact, it's not even close. Instagram logged 192 outages in that time period in the US and UK. Second place was Twitter with only 54 outages, then Snapchat at 48. Today's premium newsletter subscribers are getting a very pretty, very colorful I might add chart showing the top 30. Your company can sponsor a full month of the Friday Quiz for less than $100. Go to todayindigital.com slash ads or tap the link in the episode notes. As you may have heard, Canada is currently in the throes of a federal election. And regardless of where you may fall on the political spectrum,

Starting point is 00:11:42 you've got to acknowledge that the tweet the Liberal Party put out today was a great idea. The Liberals are the governing party right now. They're led by Justin Trudeau. This morning, they put out this tweet, which is a video of Trudeau looking right into the camera and delivering this in one take. So we launched our platform last week. It's an ambitious plan to move Canada forward. I can't cover everything, but here are the highlights in 90 seconds. We're going to make vaccines mandatory for everyone on planes, trains...

Starting point is 00:12:14 He goes on to list the major platform points, even stumbles over his words a few times, and then, at the end... Energy grid, what time, how much time is that? 85 seconds. 85 seconds, that definitely wasn't everything. I'm out of time. Go to liberal.ca to learn more. As of today, polling shows the Liberals are most likely going to win, but will return to Parliament with a minority government.

Starting point is 00:12:38 One last reminder, if you know of anybody looking for work who has a background with both journalism and digital marketing in the trenches digital marketing experience we mean here please send them our job listing for an associate producer send them to today in digital.com slash job and thanks so much there are only two things on my weekend list clean out the garage that's probably going to take all weekend, frankly. And more exercise. Not that I want to, frankly, because the rain has started here now.

Starting point is 00:13:10 But because, you know, if you have Apple's fitness app, there is a competition element to it. I challenged my mom to a week-long competition of who can get the most rings closed or however it is that they calculate. Anyway, long story short, my mom is kicking my ass right now and I'm not happy about it. So there's going to be a lot of bike riding and walking in my future this weekend. Today in Digital Marketing

Starting point is 00:13:35 is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Sunemu First Nation on beautiful Vancouver Island. Production support and fact-checking by Sarah Guild. Theme composer Mark Bluffus has a plan and a beer in one hand. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:13:52 Have a restful weekend. I'll talk to you on Monday. With a beer in one hand Paint the porch, run a strand Barbed wire and work my lawnmower tan If the neighbors don't understand Shake their heads, I'll just raise my can Don't underestimate a man with a plan And a beer in one hand

Today in Digital Marketing - Don't Underestimate a Man With a Plan, and a Beer in One Hand.

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