Today in Digital Marketing - How NOT to Handle a P.R. Crisis

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, why aren't more marketers using TikTok? Microsoft punishes us for spammers of using the system. Vimeo improves your brand's video searchability, while LinkedIn improves its search results. And why you should never mail cockroaches to your critics. It's Monday, May 16th. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. What happens all the time? The ad campaign you're running for your client or brand starts to tank.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Everything was fine last week, but now it's Monday morning and your CPMs are through the roof. Your CTRs are at historical lows. Usually, the first thing we do is to dive into one of two things, either your historical data or that emergency reserve of gin. But maybe it's not just you. Maybe everyone's down. How would you know? You could surf Twitter, maybe ask in an industry Slack, but that's anecdotal data, if you even find it. The developers of one new tool say they found a solution. The tool is at Veros.com. Basically, you hook your ad account up to it, just like hundreds of other marketers who are also hooking up their accounts. Then Veros anonymizes the brand identifying data, leaving the actual metrics intact. This means

Starting point is 00:01:17 you can see how your numbers compare with hundreds of others. And because the various ad platforms are sending other data through the API, like your industry vertical, you can even compare with other brands in your sector. Douglas Bultman is the VP of Business at Veros. I spoke with him earlier today. So if you're a beauty company, or if you're an apparel or food and beverage, those are some of the verticals that we support. And then you can compare to other companies in your vertical or based on your objectives. So if you're doing a retargeting campaign, for example, you can compare your metrics to others doing that. And also other things like AOV levels.

Starting point is 00:01:48 So if you have a specific AOV level, if it's high, for example, you don't want to be comparing your cost per acquisition compared to someone with a low AOV level. So we give you different parameters to filter the data by. How much does it cost? It's free for now. So this product is more valuable with a network effect.

Starting point is 00:02:26 So you want to be benchmarking against others. And if there's only 10 people on there, 10 companies on there, it wouldn't be very valuable for you. So for now, it's free. And go away from free and suddenly, probably the smaller companies, I would imagine, would sort of shy away from it. But have you thought about how that will play out? We have a few scenarios how it will play out. We're going to have a free version. We'll have some level of benchmarking that will be very valuable for people for free forever. But we'll offer more granular benchmarks in a paid version. Again, their website is varos.com. That's V-A-R-O-S dot com. Incidentally,

Starting point is 00:02:51 this was not a sponsored placement. I just spotted it out there, thought it was cool and asked Douglas for a brief interview. More than half of marketers still have no plans to add TikTok to their social media strategy. Social Media Examiner released its annual marketing industry report today to help you learn how other marketers in the field are using social media. The report found that while only one in five marketers are using TikTok, adoption is rapidly growing with 40% of marketers planning to increase their organic activities on the platform in the next 12 months.

Starting point is 00:03:30 That's up from 20% last year. Here's what else marketers plan to do with their social strategies in the coming year, according to the report, and I'm going to be quoting fairly liberally here. First of all, Facebook is declining. Marketers have been diversifying away from Facebook steadily since 2019. When asked to select their single most important platform, only 47% said Facebook. That's down from 67% in 2018. 13% of marketers indicated they'll be decreasing their organic marketing on Facebook, and only 40% of marketers plan on increasing

Starting point is 00:04:01 those organic activities. Also, almost 80% of marketers are using Instagram, and 61% of them plan on increasing their Instagram organic activities over the next year. Instagram is the number one platform marketers say they want to learn more about. The report also notes that Facebook and Instagram are the top two platforms used by marketers. Also, short-form video formats like Reels are growing. No surprise there. Nearly one in four marketers say these are their most important video formats,

Starting point is 00:04:33 which actually sounds a little low to me. One in four? Whatever. YouTube interest is still high. 67% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube video, and nearly 70% want to learn more about organic video marketing there. Finally, the report indicates that Facebook and Instagram contribute the most to sales for marketers, while LinkedIn and Facebook contribute the most leads. The full study is definitely worth a read as it delves into a more in-depth analysis of how marketers are using

Starting point is 00:05:00 social media to grow their business. A link to download the report is available in today's premium newsletter. So this is why we can't have nice things. Microsoft Bing has dropped anonymous sitemap submission due to spam problems. The company said that recent evaluations have shown that it was often subject to misuse by spanners. As a result, Microsoft announced it has deprecated the method and will no longer accept XML sitemaps that were submitted anonymously through HTTP requests. Instead, it's recommending webmasters use

Starting point is 00:05:36 alternative tools, the ones that we're really more familiar with anyway over on the Google side, including robots.txt. So for that use, you're going to include a reference to your sitemap in that robots.txt file, which is located at the root of your host. This informs all the search engines, of course, not just Bing. And you can use the Bing webmaster tools to submit your sitemaps. The company also encourages webmasters to use IndexNow to inform Bing and other search engines of any changes to their sites in real time. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

Starting point is 00:06:17 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. There are some options for websites for you to put your brand's videos on. A lot of brands use YouTube, of course, but many use Vimeo because it has some added security features like being able to restrict where the videos can be embedded and so on. And today, the company announced it has implemented some new video SEO enhancements.

Starting point is 00:06:48 It has added structured data to all of its publicly available videos on the platform, and this will improve your search visibility in search engines. The video hosting platform said it worked with Google as an early adopter of Google's search best practices for video players, and with the new update, your videos will have, quote, the best opportunity to appear for relevant searches, unquote. Which is kind of interesting considering that when you think about it, Vimeo is sort of a competitor to Google's YouTube. It's also worth noting that Vimeo is not exclusive to these video best practices.

Starting point is 00:07:20 In fact, the best practices the company is referring to are the same that Google publishes for anyone to read and take advantage of. That said, of course, changes will be a welcome upgrade for brands that are using Vimeo. And they say there's nothing you have to do specifically to benefit from those changes outside of making your video public. And what that means is that it is indexable, that your metadata is optimized, and that chapters are visible to Google search for key moments and so on. As for Vimeo's specific SEO advice, the company recommends some basic tips, including adding chapters to your videos, which I should mention is actually only available on their pro plan,

Starting point is 00:07:54 choosing your titles wisely, and like everything, researching the best keywords. Some stronger reach might be coming to your LinkedIn content. The company has made a few changes that it says will help in the search and discovery areas. First, by searching for a particular subject, users can now see posts from their connections, as well as other relevant posts from creators outside their network. I'm going to wait and see to see whether or not this is actually valuable. You know, sometimes the way platforms like Instagram implement it, it's just kind of garbage that you're seeing in the feed.

Starting point is 00:08:28 But screenshots I've seen of this, it looks okay. The update also makes it easier to rediscover content. So now, if you're looking for something that you've seen before, you can search with the creator's name and keywords from their post. Next, companies that are service providers will be able to share reviews with their community on LinkedIn. And they can showcase their work through a new featured section on their page. LinkedIn members can now also personalize their profile with unique referral links. They say that with creator mode, users can add a link to the top of their profile so that audiences can learn more about them and their brand in a, quote, more personalized way. And finally, the platform is testing real-time captions for audio events up until now users could only listen to an audio

Starting point is 00:09:12 event on the platform currently this feature is only available in english finally we finished today with a baffling story of corporate loyalty gone horribly wrong. A former eBay executive has pleaded guilty to taking part in a bizarre harassment campaign that involved sending cockroaches, spiders, a bloody pig mask, and other strange items to a couple in Massachusetts. The executive is actually the last of seven eBay employees that pleaded guilty to harassing and stalking the two. The group's scheme was meant to intimidate the couples because they were critics of eBay, had a website criticizing the site, and they had reviews up, some negative coverage of eBay.

Starting point is 00:10:03 They also had a newsletter. This apparently, I guess, pissed off the executives and allegedly they harassed the couple on Twitter, doxed their address, including mailing some kind of gross items to their home. And even in-person surveillance is alleged. As a result, the executive has pleaded guilty to five felony counts. Might actually even lead to some prison time. What's the moral here?

Starting point is 00:10:29 Don't do what they did. So this afternoon, my wife and I are going to spa school where we learn all about chemicals. I'm actually really excited about this. We're going to learn about pH balance and alkalinity and hardness of water and calcium. And my wife is a microbiologist specializing in cell

Starting point is 00:10:53 biology, so I think she's kind of got it covered. But I'm... I don't know. I haven't been to school. I was never a good student. But we'll see. A classified ad for you here. Fed up with your slow WordPress host and sucky customer support? Then try WPX.net But we'll see. Get 75% off the first three months until June 12th. That's WPX.net. And you can book a classified ad on this podcast for only 20 bucks. Link in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:11:31 I'm off to spa school. Talk to you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - How NOT to Handle a P.R. Crisis

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