Today in Digital Marketing - Everything Went to Hell Today and It’s All Amazon’s Fault

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

There’s a reason your favourite web tool was down today — and you can blame Amazon for it. Pinterest is going into the educational events business. And Twitter might take away your blue checkmark.➡ Join our free Slack community! TodayInDigital.com/slack➡ Watch me produce this live at twitch.tv/todmaffin (about 12-3 PT weekdays)HELP SPREAD THE WORD:Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publishReview Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST:Advertising: RedCircle.com/brands and TodayInDigital.com/adsClassified Ads: TodayInDigital.com/classifieds Leave a voicemail at TodayInDigital.com/voicemailTranscripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com Source links and full transcripts: TodayInDigital.com Email list: TodayInDigital.com/email Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio)TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA:Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffinTod’s agency: engageQ.comTikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffinTwitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin (game livestreaming)Today in Digital Marketing is produced by engageQ.com Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, there's a reason your favorite web tool was down and you can blame Amazon for it. Pinterest is going into the educational events business, and Twitter might take away your brand's blue checkmark. It's Wednesday, November 25th, 2020. Happy National Jukebox Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. It is a slow news week in the world of digital marketing. Americans celebrate Thanksgiving this week. And I think that slows the cycle down a bit. But there are a handful of things to talk about.

First, you may have had troubles today accessing your favorite web tool like Adobe Spark or Mixmax. And that's because Amazon Web Services had a huge outage. AWS is not the Amazon store you're thinking of. Rather, it's the separate division of the company that sells large scale app and database hosting. A big chunk of the internet uses it. So when AWS goes down, so too do all the tools that rely on it. And it's not just digital marketing tools. Even some people's robot vacuums went on strike. This seems to start early this morning. It is still happening as I record this at about 1.45 p.m. Pacific time. Amazon says this is only happening in North America. They didn't say what caused the outage.

One schadenfreude irony is that the outage also affected its own status page. You know, the page that reports outages. Among the web services affected, I'm not going to go through the whole list, of course, but Anchor, Ring, Prime Music, Meetup, Roku, Flickr, the payment processor Paddle, which then created its sort of own sub-outage for those web services that rely on it to process subscriptions. Even the popular game League of Legends is all messed up because of it. So anyway, nothing we can do about it of course, just wait it out and maybe rethink your brand's emergency offline contingency plans. It looks like Pinterest may soon be dipping its toes into online events.

Someone reverse engineered the site's code and found a way for people to sign up to Zoom classes through Pinterest, and it changed their board system to introduce class boards with materials and notes and stuff. Interestingly, this looks like these new board types will also include some kind of live chat. Quoting TechCrunch, it's not surprising that Pinterest would expand into the online event space given its platform has become a popular tool for organizing remote learning resources during the coronavirus pandemic. Teachers have turned to Pinterest to keep track of lesson plans, get inspiration, share educational activities, and more. In the early days of the pandemic, Pinterest reported record usage when the company

saw more searches and saves globally in a single March weekend than ever before in its history, a result of its usefulness as an online organizational tool, unquote. Pinterest did confirm the feature was in development, but didn't share anything else. Yesterday, I reported that Twitter would resume the blue checkmark verifications. They stopped adding them a couple of years ago, and people called them out for verifying some somewhat shady people. Now, we've learned that Twitter giveth and taketh away. They say they plan to de-verify some accounts. But if you have a blue checkmark, either for yourself or your brand, as long as you're active and have completed your profile, you should be okay, since that's what Twitter says it'll look

for when considering which accounts to take the checkmark away from. Or as WeRSM.com pointed out, quote, make sure your profile is complete and that you do not look like an egg. Although if you do look like an egg and you have been verified, you might need to start seeing yourself in the egg business. Who knows? A small tidbit that could have some ramifications for you. The podcast company Libsyn says it's discovered that a couple of weeks ago, Apple updated its Safari browser for their OS version 14. That's known as Mojave. And apparently, as part of that release, they broke it. Specifically, they've broken the ability for Safari to properly open up a file browser

to select a file to upload to web applications, attach files in Gmail, and so on. Again, this seems to be limited to people still on macOS Mojave, so until there's a fix, you may want to use Chrome or Firefox to do your media uploads. And finally, a small clarification to a story that I reported on yesterday. I mentioned that the social media analytics tool Buffer Analyze does not have combined channel reports. That is true. You can't, for instance, get a single chart that shows the audience growth across your brand's three social channels. You can, though, create a single report document that has three charts, each containing a different social channel's data.

So combined channel reports, yes. Combined channel data visualization, still no. And my apologies for the lack of clarity. It is American Thanksgiving tomorrow. Most Americans still don't seem to realize that they are celebrating it on the wrong day. Here in Canada, we do it the right way in October. But since so much digital marketing news comes out of the US and the US will be on a stat holiday, there will be no episode tomorrow. And I assure you

that taking this day off is in no way whatsoever related to the fact that the Steel Dawn DLC dropped for Fallout 76. No correlation at all. Alright, talk to you Friday. I'm here to move tonight alive. I'm in my limbo.