Today in Digital Marketing - Hootsuite Has Lost Its Soul

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

Hootsuite fires an employee who spoke out about its contract with a controversial U.S. government agency, big news for big brands who use big data, why is Canada’s public broadcaster getting out of the podcast business, Google wants you to tell better stories, and just when you thought SEPTEMBER was bad for Facebook ad performance...Join our Slack community! TodayInDigital.com/slackNot subscribed yet? Subscribe links at TodayInDigital.com HELP SPREAD THE WORD:Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publishReview Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST:Produced by: engageQ.com Advertising: RedCircle.com/brands and TodayInDigital.com/adsTranscripts: See each episode at 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/@todmaffiTwitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin (game livestreaming)Source links and full transcripts at TodayInDigital.com Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, Hootsuite fires an employee Be protected. Be Zen. Google wants you to tell better stories. And just when you thought September was bad for Facebook ad performance, dot, dot, dot. It's Wednesday, October 7th, 2020. Happy National Kale Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing. What the hell is going on over at Hootsuite anyway? First, they form a staff committee to get opinions about whether they should accept a contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department. That's the body that's been connected to the death of at least six migrant children in

its custody and the alleged hysterectomies media say were forced on women in their care. So Hootsuite asks their staff for their opinion. They say, should we take this contract with ICE? Reports say staff say, no, please don't take that contract. They do anyway. This leads to an employee tweeting about it saying, my customer satisfaction scores are really high. If they fire me, it will purely be retaliatory. So yeah, guess who Hootsuite just fired? Yes, the whistleblower. Not even two weeks after her tweet. Hootsuite is a Canadian company, got an American CEO earlier in the summer. After all this blew up a couple of weeks ago, he announced they wouldn't be taking the contract now after all. Not because it's wrong, of course, but rather because of the, quote, reaction from our people, unquote. A PR company hired by Hootsuite

to handle media inquiries wouldn't confirm to me that they fired anyone, you know, privacy and all, but sent me the same statement all the other media got, which said they, quote, support differences of thoughts and opinions within the company, but must be unequivocal in upholding our confidentiality obligations, unquote. This, honestly, is misstep after misstep. Politics aside, why would you even want to go anywhere near ICE right now? It's one of the most controversial government agencies in America. Your staff say, please don't, you do anyway, and then when you're called out by an employee, you back off and fire the employee.

Hootsuite is a certified B Corp. In fact, when you go to the B Corp homepage, Hootsuite's logo is even displayed as a paragon of ethics. Among the criteria for getting B Corp certification, a commitment to treating employees with dignity, and using business as a force for good. Podcasts, of course, are one of the shiny new things in our digital marketing world, and some companies have taken to creating their own branded podcasts. Most don't do this themselves.

They hire production companies like Pacific Content or Gimlet Creative. One organization that tried to jump into this mix was the Canadian public broadcaster, the CBC. A month or two ago, it proudly announced a new division called Tandem that would create branded podcasts for clients. But the CBC's main union, the CMG, threw a flag on the field, saying producing a paid podcast series could harm the journalistic integrity of the main network. The CBC does run ads on its networks, but the CMG said developing these full series goes a bit far. This week, the CBC said

it was putting Tandem on hold. A spokesperson wouldn't say the union's concerns were behind the decision, only that they are, quote, pausing to gain deeper insights into this initiative, unquote, which, let me translate here, is PR speak for the union's concerns were behind the decision, we just don't want to say so. Full disclosure, I spent 10 years at the CBC's radio network as a host and producer, as well as being its technology columnist, and I developed the network's first national podcast strategy. On Monday, I told you about the huge apparent problems with Facebook's advertising platform.

People have been watching their campaign's performance drop right off a cliff, ever since September, it seems. More anecdotes are coming in, this one from our own Slack community. One member reporting yesterday, quote, We had a brutal September after three really good months for seemingly no reason. I reached out to the very good firm running Facebook ads for us to see if they saw any inexplicable downturns. Our account strategist said, yeah, it's interesting. I saw a major Facebook slowdown for you and even worse for one of my other clients.

I've chatted with some of our huge clients. They spend $100,000 plus per month in Facebook, and they've seen a similar showdown as well, although they seem to think it's more to do with the election than anything. Something more concerning is the first week of October has been awful, like red sirens awful, unquote. So if your Facebook campaigns have been taking a big hit in the last few weeks, at least console yourself with the fact that somewhere in the world there is a digital marketer like you out there experiencing the same thing, taking a big hit in the last few weeks. At least console yourself with the fact that somewhere in the world,

there is a digital marketer like you out there experiencing the same thing, and she's on her eighth shot of whiskey, and it's not even 11 a.m. Which reminds me, you are missing out on all sorts of stuff in our Slack community. Just go to todayindigital.com slash Slack or tap the link in this episode's notes. Yesterday, I reported that Google will start showing web stories in its Google app, specifically the Discover section. Today, they outlined six reasons your content won't appear there. There are the obvious ones, of course, copyrighted content that you don't own, stuff that's too commercial.

But there are some things I didn't expect, one being a lack of narrative. Google said, we don't allow web stories that are missing a binding theme or narrative structure from page to page. Also, you can't have too many words in your stories. 180 words is the max. Honestly, I don't even know how you'd fit 180 words into a single vertical story image without being completely illegible anyway, but whatever.

Your videos and images, of course, have to be good quality, no distortion or too much pixelation. And here's the big one, no clickbaiting. Stories that require users to click over to your site to see your content will not appear in that section. Google, you take the fun out of everything. YouTube this morning announced it is introducing a new captions editor on YouTube Studio. This change brings a new pop-up window with a new design, so you don't need to open a new browser tab.

Faster captions with parallel auto-sync processing, meaning you no longer have to wait before they assign timing to the captions you've provided or entered. And caption timings alongside the audio stream, so you can better see where to place your captions. They've also added a handful of keyboard shortcuts and a slider to let you zoom into the timeline. This next story will be big news if you work for a big brand and use big data. Google Analytics is adding a free BigQuery export options to their platform. So if you need to dump a whole bunch of web visit data into an engine to crunch numbers, now you can do it. It's a much easier workflow than the previous method, which involved setting up a Firebase project and then sort of hacking the data into

that project. To be clear, this was an option before, but it was only available in the paid enterprise version of Analytics called Analytics 360. This new option will be free to everyone. Also, and this is even cooler, there is a new streaming export that will export your data almost live. The data becomes available to export within seconds instead of the 10 to 15 minutes it used to take. Still working late hours on this candidate series I'm doing here in my hometown of Nanaimo, British Columbia, on beautiful Vancouver Island. We are having a provincial election here. Some of you asked if you can hear the series, and this one, no, because I'm still producing it. But I did a similar series for the last federal election, and if you're curious, you can find the podcast at Nanaimo Chronicles.com, or just search for Nanaimo Chronicles in your podcast app. That's Nanaimo,

N-A-N-A-I-M-O Chronicles. Talk to you tomorrow.