Today in Digital Marketing - Inside Meta's Möbius Strip of Support Hell

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, January 16th. Today, social media collapsing. More than half of consumers say they're ready to bail out. Google laying off hundreds of reps that marketers rely on. Do you actually need to use hashtags on your LinkedIn posts? And the endless cycle of hopelessness, doom, and misery that is Meta's tech support. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get

Starting point is 00:00:41 cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free.

Starting point is 00:01:16 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. Social media platforms are expected to take a hit in the next couple of years. A new Gartner study says half of consumers plan to abandon

Starting point is 00:01:39 or significantly limit their interactions with social media by next year. Why? Top reasons include the spread of misinformation, toxic users, and how many bots there are. Also, and I thought this was more interesting actually, 7 out of 10 consumers said they think the obsession these platforms have with generative AI will harm the user experience. Quoting Emily Weiss, a senior principal researcher for Gartner, with generative AI will harm the user experience. Quoting Emily Weiss, a senior principal researcher for Gartner, quote, social media remains the top investment channel for digital marketing,

Starting point is 00:02:16 but consumers are actively trying to limit their use. A significant slice says that compared to a few years ago, they're sharing less of their own lives and content, unquote. According to the report, 53% of consumers believe that social media has deteriorated compared to both the previous year and five years ago. We don't cover a lot of the tech layoffs on here, but now those layoffs are starting to seep into the digital marketing space with a few hundred employees on Google's advertising sales team being dropped. Quoting Business Insider, quote, B.I. previously reported that Google was shifting more staff away from large customer sales, a team that serves the company's bigger advertising clients, to its Google Customer Solutions team, which serves more medium-level clients. This was happening as more large clients didn't need access to as many Google resources,

Starting point is 00:03:13 current and former employees said. Google is also attempting to automate more of its processes through products such as Performance Max, which uses Google's AI to determine how advertisers' money should be spent across products. This reorganization is the next evolution of that, as cuts appear to be primarily targeted at the large customer sales team, unquote.

Starting point is 00:03:36 Tomorrow, our Google Ads correspondent Jill Saskengales, who spent six years in sales at Google, will be here to walk us through the potential impact of this on digital marketers. FedEx is coming for Amazon. The company announcing this week it is launching a new commerce platform called FDX that it says will help online retailers manage their supply chain, sell things, and handle deliveries. Quoting The Verge, quote, FDX will combine existing FedEx commerce tools like access to members of ShopRunner, an e-commerce marketplace FedEx acquired in 2020, with features debuting in the fall, like the ability to create a custom post-purchase experience so brands can give customers more accurate shipment information or use insight from FedEx's shipment network data for order

Starting point is 00:04:26 management. The new platform comes as the company competes in logistics with Amazon, a company FedEx has seen as a threat to its business for years. In 2019, FedEx declined to renew a contract to fly Amazon cargo through FedEx. Later that year, Amazon forbade its sellers from using FedEx for prime deliveries during the holiday, blaming declining performance, a ban it lifted the next year, unquote. This is, of course, a pivot that FedEx really didn't have a choice in doing. Both it and UPS have been hurting since Amazon switched to its own delivery network, a network so large now that last year it made more home package deliveries than UPS and FedEx combined. So you have written your company's LinkedIn post,

Starting point is 00:05:17 and now all that's left is to add hashtags. But wait, should you? Do they even do anything other than clutter up the post? Social Media Today reports that hashtags are not a sure path to reach. Quote, As you may recall, for a long time, LinkedIn didn't actually support hashtags at all. But then in 2018, the platform not only reactivated hashtag discoverability, it also started pushing hashtag use in an effort to get users manually categorizing their posts.

Starting point is 00:05:47 The idea here is that through better content segmentation, LinkedIn is then better able to show more users content than they're interested in. But over time, as algorithms have evolved, the need for hashtags in general has lessened. Because social platform systems are now much better at taking in the whole context of a post's text, including visuals, user history, and all keywords included. In other words, hashtags are less important because most of the time, relevant mentions and indicators are included in the post anyway, and that's enough to ensure the system can show your post to the most interested audiences, unquote. Researcher Richard Vanderbloom, who has previously studied hashtags on LinkedIn,

Starting point is 00:06:32 now says they do not increase reach at all anymore. And honestly, this is probably the case as well with all platforms that use hashtags. They were a helpful tool when Twitter users started using them to group conversations. In time, spammers took over, AI got smarter, and the truth is, there's probably not much use for them in most major social platforms anymore. A small change with Meta's Threads app now lets you hide both like and share counts on your posts. Up until now, you've only been able to hide like counts. This is set for each post if you want to tinker at that depth, but you can also make it the account default by going to settings, then privacy in the mobile app. One thing to note, since Threads uses Instagram's code foundation, doing this will also hide those details on your Instagram account as well.

Starting point is 00:07:26 Quoting social media today again, quote, Back in 2019, Instagram launched an initial test of hidden like counts with some users. That test showed some promise in helping to depressurize the Instagram experience. But then COVID happened. The project got shelved for a time in order to focus on other elements. In 2021, Instagram rolled out the option for all users to hide like counts on posts. And since then, it's included this within its suite of well-being and management tools designed to help people customize their own Instagram experience.

Starting point is 00:07:58 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? 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. And finally, one of the advantages that Meta says you'll have when you pay for a blue verified checkmark is better support. You'll have access to actual humans when something goes wrong. And things go wrong with Meta's platform all the time.

Starting point is 00:08:41 For marketers, one of the most common and frustrating issues is getting locked out of their account. It seems to happen at random. Meta's policy enforcement AI bots mistake some behavior pattern as nefarious, or someone successfully hacks into your account, and poof, you are locked out with no human beings to help. So some brands have taken to buying the blue checkmark just so they can get a real live support rep at Meta and not a support bot. But, and I know this will not come as a surprise to you, this new system is hardly a pathway to actual issue resolution. Ars Technica reported this week on some poor photographer who got locked out of her Instagram account. The issue was that initially she signed up using her husband's

Starting point is 00:09:25 cell phone number, but then they got divorced. Now ex-husband changed his number, a hacker got into her account, and the app tried sending the reset code to her ex-husband's now defunct phone number. Meta's ironically named help pages didn't get her an answer, nor did filling out the forms. So she sprung for the paid verification, which promises, quoting from Meta's sales page on this, quote, help when you need it from a real person on common account issues that matter to you, unquote. She got in touch with a real person, apparently named Maria, and was told that the company's internal team was working on the issue and they would get back to her. Then, nothing for an entire week. Remember, this was her business Instagram account.

Starting point is 00:10:17 Being unable to log in meant not replying to comments or to DMs from prospects. Eventually, she got a templated response telling her to check the recovery number sent to her ex-husband's non-existing phone number. So she emailed Maria back, who said, Hi Amy, we know how important it is for you to get updates regarding your concern. We appreciate your patience while we work on your case. We just wanted to update you that our The next day, another email telling her to check the phone that doesn't exist. Now, though, a meta rep named Matt... You know what? We need some music for this. Now, though, a meta rep named Matt asked her to send in a screen recording of her using the code on the phone number that, just so we're all following along

Starting point is 00:11:13 here, does not exist. A few days passed, and Maria is back saying she has now shared the issue with Meta's respective team. Then another email saying, we appreciate your patience while we work on your case. We just wanted to update you that our dedicated team is still working diligently on your case. As Ars Technica wrote, when they call in the dedicated team, you know that things are getting serious. And then a few days later, a new email. Could this finally be the answer? Could an actual human have read her issue with their eyeballs, understood the issue in their brain, and done something to help her? I have the email right here.

Starting point is 00:11:59 It says, try resetting the code from the phone number that does not exist. And ends with, we'll now closed this ticket, have a beautiful day, and stay safe. So, she emailed back, begging them to just send the code to the verified email address on file. Problem solved. But they wouldn't. Instead, MetaSupport actually got a little snotty. Quote, We hope you understand the limitations in assistance that can be offered at this moment.

Starting point is 00:12:38 If your request is denied, please do not resubmit the request unless there is new information that is likely to have a direct impact on the decision that was made, unquote. But the photographer soldiered on and emailed again, and this time Melissa replied, saying she would forward the issue on to the relevant team, quote, we'll not put your hard work to waste. We'll do our part by doing the best we can to have your issue resolved, unquote. But the relevant team didn't seem to have any more power than the internal team, the respective team, or the dedicated teams. Quoting Ars Technica again, quote,

Starting point is 00:13:20 Amy lives out endless replays of this disappointing loop. She receives polite but pointless replies from Hazel and other new people. Maria makes a return from time to time. They're always reviewing options and sending things to a dedicated or relevant team. The problem is never solved. Perhaps the Meta support team models its service on the Meta logo that resembles the infinity sign, unquote. Well, finally today, a resolution. One that came not because Meta's support team is good, but because Meta's PR team is

Starting point is 00:13:54 risk-averse. Again, quoting Ars Technica, quote, less than 24 hours after this story was published, a spokesperson for Meta reached out and said they would look into the issue. Then, about an hour later, her account was unlocked. Meta was able to temporarily remove the two-factor authentication on her account and the requirement for a recovery code. Afterward, the spokesperson told Ars the following, quote, in terms of what happened, due to a system error that has since been resolved, our normal path to regain access to an account was not working at the time of her requests. Our support reps were not aware of the issue at the time.

Starting point is 00:14:31 The issue has since been resolved. Unquote. Look, I'm not a betting man, but I've got five bucks here saying there was no system error. And internally, probably nothing has changed. Who's with me? In my darkest hour All I need to think of you Having fun still doing the live stream on Twitch.

Starting point is 00:15:00 I started live streaming the scripting even of it. So if you're completely bored one day, drop by. Be nice to meet you. Say hi in the chat room. It is twitch.tv slash low effort dad. Don't forget about our email newsletter. It is free. It comes out every day.

Starting point is 00:15:18 It contains everything you hear in the podcast and links to learn more about the stories we cover, videos, charts, illustrations, and so on. You can sign up by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. I'm Todd Mathen. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Inside Meta's Möbius Strip of Support Hell

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