Today in Digital Marketing - “Enhance!”

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, Buffer adds engagement tools again, your next search result could come back in AR, how to repurpose your brand's content without being penalized by Google, and why you should ignore studies about the best time to post on social media. It's Tuesday, January 26th, 2021. Happy Australia Day! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. With everything going digital, sometimes it's nice to get our brand out there in the real world, and in a way that really connects with people, not just running billboard ads. Often, in the marketing industry, we call these opportunities activations.

Starting point is 00:00:40 One brand is doing a particularly fun one. The brand is 7-Eleven. Starting Monday, they will be renting out one of their Dallas locations on Airbnb. And I know you're thinking, why on earth would I want to stay overnight in a 7-Eleven? Well, it comes with free unlimited Slurpees, but the real connection is for gaming fans because the deal comes with a gaming setup, PlayStation 5, and a one-hour live stream session with a top-name esports player. That live stream will be hosted by the Dallas Cowboys' quarterback. It's limited to two guests from the same household, COVID and all, and there are only two single-night stays available. But there's something deeper going on here. Quoting MarketingDive.com,

Starting point is 00:01:42 Giving fans access to a PlayStation 5 makes 7-Eleven the latest brand to market around Sony's highly coveted new console and the resulting console war with Xbox's new devices. While Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Buzz Light mocked buzzy console tech with November campaigns, KFC this month announced plans for an actual gaming system. The social platform Blog2Social has published a breakdown of what the best times to post on social media are and what the top performing days are and the best frequency to use. And this would be a good opportunity for me to remind you that whenever you see studies or blog posts or infographics like this,

Starting point is 00:02:21 you should ignore them because they're nonsense. Oh sure, the data is probably accurate across thousands and thousands of channels. Maybe Thursday is the most active day on Facebook. But you don't run thousands and thousands of averaged channels. You run one channel, one Facebook page, one Twitter account, one Pinterest profile. And the performance of your channel will almost certainly be quite a bit different than the global average. We see this most clearly when those studies are broken down by vertical. The top-line averages might say Thursday's good, but when they break it down to, say, pages related to sports, Thursday's terrible.

Starting point is 00:03:02 Sunday's the best. Yes, weekends are generally better on Pinterest, as you'd imagine. And weekdays during working hours are better on LinkedIn, as you'd imagine. But the only way to find the right time and frequency to post on your channel is to measure your channel's data and not rely on data from other brands' channels. Google has made it easier to report bad reviews appearing on your Google My Business profile. In the past, it was pretty generic. Now, you can get a little more granular

Starting point is 00:03:35 in why you think a posted review should be off your profile. There are seven categories you can report in. When the review doesn't pertain to an experience at or with the business. When the review is from a bot or fake account, whether it's affiliated with someone with the business or a competitor's business, if it contains profanity or mentions other illegal activity, if the review personally attacks a specific individual or has harmful language about a group based on identity, or if it contains personal information like someone's phone number. Hopefully, Google is using this to route the review to the appropriate team, and that should mean faster action.

Starting point is 00:04:15 The social media platform Buffer has added back some engagement functionality to their platform. A bit of history here. A few years ago, Buffer bought an engagement platform that they rebranded to Buffer Reply. You could use it to reply to Facebook comments and private messages, to tweets, to Instagram comments, you know, the usual. They operated it as a separate platform with its own pricing. And sure, there were links between this reply platform and their main published platform, but the two always kind of stood alone. Then, rather abruptly, they shut down Reply. We were the first to report its closure. At the time, Buffer said they just didn't like the way

Starting point is 00:04:50 it was performing. Now, it seems they're building engagement back in, but in a very limited form so far. For now, it's only Instagram comments. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Pinterest. They do have what they call smart alerts to let you know if a post has a specific question or if it's negative in tone or if it's talking about a purchase. And this time, the cost is included with any of their main paid plans. Anytime some movie set in the future shows a search engine, it's usually returning results not on a page on Google or something, but as a hologram or a 3D augmented reality model. It's sort of goofy in the same way that writers of crime shows believe all you need to do is click a button called enhance to take a

Starting point is 00:05:36 blurry pixelated photo and turn it into a 4K image of the criminal. Well, now that future is actually getting a little closer. In a move that marketers of car brands will probably love, Google is now capable of returning search results that are 3D augmented reality models of cars. It's only a test for now, but it is a live test. They've partnered with Porsche, Volvo, and FCA for this. And the returned model is incredibly detailed. It's three gigabytes of data streamed in chunks as you move the camera around. You can try it now by searching for Porsche Panorama.

Starting point is 00:06:14 One catch, for the time being, it only works on Android. And that brings us to the lightning round. NBCUniversal has cut a deal with Twitter to provide programming around more than 30 upcoming live events, including the Golden Globes and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Google is testing a new mobile search design and a new font. The titles of pages returned in Google's search for those people in the test group uses a font that looks like the one used in Google's logo. Speaking of search, Google's John Mueller has revealed that identical content published in different formats, like blog posts repurposed verbatim from a video, not considered duplicate content by the engine.

Starting point is 00:06:55 And those items of content will not be penalized. And some digital marketers are reporting this morning that logos are being removed from their brand's Google My Business profiles. One fellow who runs 15 profiles found that Google had taken all the logos off. And those profiles are now reporting error messages saying their profile isn't complete because, well, there's no logo. So you may want to check yours. Well, the new chapter of Elder Scrolls Online drops this afternoon, so I will be hanging out on Twitch trying to earn whatever drops they're giving away there. Crown crates, I think, which are free digital packages of cosmetic items like outfits. Yes, that's right. I'm a 50-year-old

Starting point is 00:07:40 man who is so excited about the possibility of getting a shiny purple costume for my pretend video game character that I have cleared that time on my calendar. Pray for me. That's it for today, and now here it is, your moment of Digital Marketing Zen. The VIX tickets were in section 203, seats M26 and 28. And this video is the best view of those seats. Looks like they have the same logos on their ball caps. I'll enhance that.

Today in Digital Marketing - “Enhance!”

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