Today in Digital Marketing - English Be Hard

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, another platform has entered the vertical stories arena. The same week it suffers the effects of an apparent data breach. Podcast listening is up, but not nearly as much as one industry news site would have you believe it is. There's a bigger, better crawl report inside Search Console. And Google upgrades its PDF parser to be more, well, actually usable. It's Monday, November 30th, 2020. Happy 10th anniversary, social media platform buffer. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. A good way to figure out where the social platforms are going as it relates to

Starting point is 00:00:38 our roles as digital marketers is to watch closely the acquisition details in play. They don't often get a lot of attention in the media, but they have a significant effect on the space. As I'm sure you've heard, over the weekend, Apple acquired Facebook in a $280 billion deal. Nah, I'm just kidding. But Facebook did do a little buying on its own, picking up the customer service automation platform Customer.

Starting point is 00:01:01 That's customer with a K. That tool helps manage customer queries, especially via direct message. And it uses machine learning because you get more VC funding when you put that phrase in your pitch deck. Specifically, the AI looks for common questions, then tries to respond automatically or as a fallback, roots it to a human being. Frankly, this is something Facebook itself could use in its support of advertisers, but that's another story for another day. This kind of AI-based language deconstruction is not easy. One of the social engagement tools we use at our agency has a feature that will try to

Starting point is 00:01:34 understand what the person's saying, then suggests one of two responses that you've typed in the past as a shortcut to answer this question. Problem is, it doesn't really work that well. Not in the real world. It looks great on the feature page of their website, but I have yet to see one of these automated suggestions actually suggest a previously used response that would be relevant. The problem isn't the platform, it's the language.

Starting point is 00:02:00 English is a difficult language for a computer to parse. It has lots of nuance and subtleties that require a complex set of rules to determine meaning. And it's always changing, too. Take the word sick as an example. If your brand is a big video game company and you've just released a popular shooter, then the word sick is a positive. If you're a restaurant brand, the word sick is most definitely a negative.

Starting point is 00:02:23 Take my word for this. 20 years ago, I co-founded an artificial intelligence software firm that tried to decrypt the English language. We analyzed web forums and broadcast news stories. There wasn't really any social media back in 2000. The goal was to provide a mood score of sorts of publicly traded stocks, essentially an early form of semantic processing. And yes, the VCs loved us. We went public through an RTO less than a year after we founded it. But despite recruiting PhD-level computational linguists

Starting point is 00:02:54 from universities and moving them and their families to Vancouver, despite pouring thousands of hours of developer time into it, the software just didn't work that well. English is hard. So it'll be interesting to see how this customer, customer with a K, acquisition actually plays out in the real world. Facebook did note it plans to deploy this mostly on WhatsApp, which should give you advance warning that

Starting point is 00:03:17 Facebook is starting to think more strategically about that service. So if you do a lot of DMs with customers about purchases, it might be worth getting a WhatsApp account, at least to play around with it so you know what's coming. Facebook says 175 million people contact businesses via WhatsApp every day. Well, another platform has gotten drunk on the cheap gin and in a moment of weakness has jammed vertical stories into their app. Because all the kids want vertical stories, am I right? That platform? Spotify.

Starting point is 00:03:52 It's about what you'd expect. Looks like all the other stories' implementations, you know, tap on the right to advance. I'll snark aside. It actually makes some sense for Spotify. Everyone uses smartphones these days and giving the artists the ability to put a more personal touch out there is probably a good idea. Spotify told Engadget it's only a test. Quote, We routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience. Some of these tests end up paving the path for our broader user experience,

Starting point is 00:04:18 and others serve only as an important learning. Unquote. But let's face it. Of course it'll be coming because what this is really about is ad revenue. Adding a new placement for us in between stories is pretty decent real estate. In other Spotify news, some media are reporting the company

Starting point is 00:04:36 was affected by a nasty data breach and had to reset 350,000 of its users' passwords. Accuracy matters, especially when dealing with data, especially when reporting on data that marketers might use to make informed media buying decisions, which is why I'm a little disappointed in the website searchenginejournal.com. They put out a blog post saying that more than 55% of the U.S. population listens to podcasts. The story didn't cite the source of this data, but they linked to a new study from Edison Media, which definitely did not report that more than 55% of the U.S. population listens to podcasts.

Starting point is 00:05:18 What the survey did report is that more than 55% of the U.S. population has ever listened to a podcast, ever. That's an important distinction. The majority of people I talk to in, you know, average world, not those of us in our insular little world of digital marketing, that those people have probably heard of podcasts, and maybe they think they have listened, but as it turns out, they only press play on a web page's audio widget and never actually subscribe to a series using an app.

Starting point is 00:05:46 When you look at the numbers with a date restrictor, like the percentage of Americans who have listened to a podcast in the last month, that number goes down to 37%, which I still think is high, but at least it's within the realm of possibility. And when you look at just listeners in the last week, it goes down to 24%. The Story on Search Engine Journal also reported that, quote, the average podcast listener subscribed to six shows in the last week. That's not true either. What the study actually reported was that of those people who listened in the last week, those people consumed an average of six different podcasts.

Starting point is 00:06:23 In other words, they listened to different podcasts. They did not subscribe to six different podcasts. Again, an important distinction. What's more embarrassing for the site, I think, is that the author of this piece herself is apparently the CEO of a social PR agency. The big takeaway? Monthly podcast consumers grew by 16% year over year. The study polled a little more than 1,500 Americans aged 12 and over. And two small items to wrap up today. First, there's a new version of CrawlStats, the CrawlStats report inside Google Search Console. It adds a total number of requests grouped by response code, crawled file type, Googlebot type, and crawl purpose.

Starting point is 00:07:10 It also displays specific URL examples and a quick summary for properties with multiple hosts. And Google Workspace is rolling out some updates that will make PDFs converted into Google Docs better. Specifically, you may notice improvements in image imports, including the image itself and text wrapping related to images, text styles and formatting, such as importing underline and strikethrough correctly, background color and more fonts, and layout conversion, including support for multi-column layouts, custom page sizes, tables with borders, and improved content

Starting point is 00:07:44 ordering. They are rolling it out starting today. Should take about two or three days to get around to everyone. So over the weekend, I switched from the Chrome browser to the Brave browser, which, yes, is based on the Chromium foundations, but doesn't send backdoor data to Google and blocks ads and tracking by default. I know it's a little hypocritical of me, given that ads and cookies are an important part of our industry, but I've been finding the older I get, the more you kids get off the lawn I get, with respect to privacy. Oh, speaking of our lawn, finally bought a lawnmower. I actually mowed it.

Starting point is 00:08:20 This is a bigger deal than it sounds. My wife and I have been condo dwellers most of our adult life, but we moved here to this here island, bought a house, it came with an actual lawn care company who'll do it for, well, a lot more than five bucks. So I found a battery-powered electric lawnmower and I went out there with the biggest, craziest-looking mask you have ever seen. It is a HEPA filter N95. You know the masks with those two things sticking out on the side? Kind of looks like Princess Leia's hairdo. You can barely breathe through it. Looks like I'm about ready to walk inside a Chernobyl reactor, but long cut and no allergic reaction.

Starting point is 00:09:15 So, adulting, yay! Talk to you tomorrow. Dehors, l'hiver est là Et les trottoirs couverts de verglas Les rues sont pleines d'âmes d'enquête D'un peu de beau temps et de chaleur C'est bien la nuit qu'on se retrouve Que tous ensemble on célèbre l'amour Et ce le temps d'une chanson Et promet au monde

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Today in Digital Marketing - English Be Hard

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