Today in Digital Marketing - The Argument for Ignoring Consumer Complaints
Episode Date: May 6, 2022How do chatbots affect your brand's stock price? LinkedIn to drop polls from the feed. TikTok's new tab might decrease your reach. Cameo lays off 25% of its staff. Go Premium! No ads, weekend... editions, story links, audio chapters, better audio quality, earlier release time, and more.Get each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links).LIVE LISTENER HANGOUT:Join us every Wednesday at 1pm PM/4pm ET for the Happy Hour Hangout! Click here at this time: todayindigital.com/happyhour HELPFUL LINKS:ADS: Reach thousands of marketers with our ad options.CLASSIFIED ADS: Only $20 — more infoMORE CONTENT: Email newsletter, expert interviews, and blog posts.HANG OUT: Join our Slack communityEnjoying the Show? Tweet about us • Rate and review • Send a voicemailFOLLOW US:The Show: LinkedIn • TikTok • Reddit • FB Page • FB GroupTod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • Twitch • InstagramDEALS:Jyll Saskin Gales — Inside Google Ads Andrew Foxwell — Foxwell Founders Membership • Scaling After iOS14 • All CoursesOthers — AppSumo lifetime marketing deals • Riverside.FM podcast recording siteCREDITS:Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Ad coordination by RedCircle. Production coordination by Sarah Guild. Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.(If the links in the show notes do not work in your podcast app, visit https://todayindigital.com )Some links in these show notes may provide us with a commission.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Today, how do chatbots affect your brand's stock price?
LinkedIn plans to drop polls from its feed.
TikTok's new tab might decrease your reach.
Cameo lays off 25% of its staff.
And the argument for ignoring complaints on Twitter.
It's Friday, May 6th.
I'm Todd Mathen.
Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.
We consumers are fickle.
We expect the products to be perfect and customer service to be fast and precise.
Problem is, people are sometimes neither of those two.
So little surprise that many brands have turned to chatbots to supplement,
or in some cases, completely replace their human customer service team.
Take Aflac, which famously has a duck as a mascot.
A couple of years ago, it introduced DuckChat,
an AI bot on Facebook Messenger that would help enroll customers.
Or Bank of America that made a chatbot named Erica
and set her to work in its mobile app,
helping customers with basic banking tasks.
There's Levi's, virtual stylist, a bot inside Facebook Messenger.
Hell, there's even LubeChat, which,ist, a bot inside Facebook Messenger.
Hell, there's even LubeChat, which, no, not what you're thinking.
This is actually a B2B chatbot from Shell, which helps share product information for customers of its industrial lubricants.
And while a lot of research has gone into how consumers react to chatbot conversations,
there hasn't been a lot of study into how the bots make people feel about the company itself. People like investors in the company. That's what Dorema
Fotheringham set out to discover. She is co-author of a research study called The Effect of Implementing
Chatbot Customer Service on Stock Returns, which was published recently in the Journal of the
Academy of Marketing Science. More importantly, though, Dorema also defended her PhD dissertation just a couple of weeks ago.
So I'm pleased to say welcome, Dr. Fotheringham.
Thank you, Todd.
So you measured how investors reacted when a company announced that they'd start using chatbots.
What did you find?
So we saw a positive bump in stock option price on the day of the event announcement.
Investors did see the value that the chatbots could provide to customers and responded with their purchasing power.
Was there any difference between B2C brands and B2B brands?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked, because that was one of the questions that me and my co-author also looked into.
And what we found was that this positive bump was especially significant for B2B companies.
And as we know, B2B companies are often lagging behind in digital customer experience compared to B2C companies. So these chatbots did provide a really good bump
for B2B companies, showing that investors saw the opportunity of increasing customer experience for
B2B customers. And we saw that reflected positively in the stock price of these companies.
But there was an exception, though, in your research.
Was there not when those chatbots in B2B brands became more human-like,
they were anthropomorphized, to use sort of a more clinical term,
that the more human a bot was, the less investors liked its use in B2B brands specifically?
Did that surprise you?
Well, if you think about the differences between B2B and B2C customers, B2B customers are busy people and they really prioritize functionality,
effectiveness, efficiencies over all these bells and whistles of adding these anthropomorphic
features, adding names and sprinkling some personality features.
I know some companies were even hiring comics to write jokes for their chatbots.
But for B2B customers, all they're interested in is the efficiencies.
Did you study the market reaction to how chatbots were rolled out?
I'm thinking like companies that just started the bots up on day one
versus those that may have started with a small beta pool of customers.
Yes. And what we found was that a soft launch, a beta launch with a segment of customers
was much more positively received by investors. So investors really valued a more measured approach
to implementing such novel technology.
Well, it's certainly interesting research. I'm delighted you could share it with us.
Thank you for your time.
You're welcome. It was a pleasure talking to you.
Dorema Fotheringham is an assistant professor at Texas Tech University.
She joined me from her office in Phoenix, Arizona.
So you want to engage with your LinkedIn audience? Do not post a poll.
LinkedIn members have apparently had enough.
The professional network announcing today it is changing its feed algorithm to provide users with a more personalized and content-relevant experience.
To start, the algorithm update will reduce the reach of engagement baiting posts, which it refers to as
low quality content. As a result, any content that asks or encourages users to engage with content
like likes or reactions will be downgraded. LinkedIn says this content could be misleading
and frustrating and that instead it will be focusing on promoting reliable, credible and
authentic content. This also includes downgrading polls. LinkedIn says it's, quote, heard feedback
that there are too many polls in the feed, unquote, and as a result, it will only be showing polls
that are helpful and relevant. Next, the algorithm will show more targeted activity from your own
network. And finally, the update is striking down political content by giving its users the option
to opt out of that content. The platform is testing a feature where the posts will have an
I don't want to see this option.
In an update that is almost as annoying as when Instagram replaced
its notifications tab with the shopping tab,
TikTok is replacing its discover tab with a new friends tab.
Friends, by the way, in TikTok's world is when you follow someone and they follow you as well.
The company has confirmed that the test is being expanded to more users.
I got it yesterday.
Apart from having to adjust to a new interface, though,
how will this change affect brands?
It could mean that if users stay specifically to that tab,
they will see less of your brand's content.
Also, that content will be harder to discover since they are removing the Discover tab.
In addition to users finding your brand account, that tab was actually pretty helpful to learn
what was trending on the app.
Cameo, the platform that allows fans to buy personalized videos from celebrity, has laid
off roughly one quarter of its staff.
This comes about 24 hours after Snapchat announced
a Snap and Cameo advertiser program at its New Front presentation.
The platform CEO confirmed the layoffs in a tweet.
Quote,
Today has been a brutal day at the office.
I made the painful decision to let go 87 beloved members of the Cameo Famio.
If you're looking to hire hungry,
humble, smart, kind, curious learning machines who love to win and you see Cameo on their resume,
look no further, unquote. TechCrunch reports the layoffs affected all teams within the company, including the senior VP of marketing, the chief product officer, and the chief technology officer.
Quoting the CEO again, to support both fan and talent demand
during the pandemic lockdowns,
Cameo's headcount exploded
from just over 100 to nearly 400.
We hired a lot of people quickly
and market conditions have rapidly changed since then.
Accordingly, we have right-sized the business
to reflect the new realities.
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budget. Gas pumps. During its New Front's presentation, retail digital display company
GSTV claimed a reach of 105 million people across the U.S., almost entirely through advertisements at gas stations.
This according to Adweek.
That's four out of 10 adults in the country, and the average consumer pumps three times
a month.
The company says this equates to each customer spending 15 minutes every month viewing its
displays.
If you're worried about your brand safety and your ad showing up alongside unsettling
gas prices.
A recent partnership with insights company Affinity found that it is 50% more effective than digital video for campaigns like consumer packaged goods.
A partnership with Live Nation Entertainment was also displayed at Shell gas stations with
a spotlight of a music artist.
According to the artist, within two months, Spotify listenership nearly tripled.
Social media have brought brands some great things, increased awareness, sales, and a direct communication channel with their customers. But that latter benefit is sometimes a curse.
Because when things go wrong, customers are happy to use that channel to complain, sometimes fiercely. The going wisdom, of course, has been for brands under fire to respond, to reply to comments in reviews, thanking the customer for feedback, explaining policy rationale, or sometimes apologizing.
But is that the right approach?
Are we then publicizing a problem that other customers might not have even known about?
That's what Ali Golmul Hadi set out to study.
He is an assistant professor of marketing
at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He and his colleagues recently published a study
called Complaint Publicization in Social Media. I spoke with him earlier this week, and he mentioned
that he decided to study this after seeing someone complain on Twitter about a brand that sold
picture-hanging adhesive tabs. When the brand responded to that complaint, the complaint, along with the
firm's response, appeared or basically moved to the Twitter page of the brand. And it was
co-located with a tweet that promoted basically product on that specific aspect. On Twitter,
when you post a tweet,
let's say you complain about a brand,
only your followers would be exposed to that complaint tweet,
which I don't know, for an average person,
it could be less than 1,000 individuals.
But as soon as the brand responds to that complaint,
the complaint, along with the brand's response,
would be posted, would appear
on the Twitter handle of the brand.
For large brands, it could be potential public exposure, visibility to more than millions of potential audiences.
We call this phenomenon firm-induced complaint publicity.
Basically, firm by responding to the complaint and advertently basically increases the visibility, if you will, of the complaint.
Our full conversation went into detail
on exactly how to reply to negative feedback,
specifically on Twitter,
and whether you should use a separate Twitter account
for your brand just to handle customer feedback.
And lots more topics we covered.
That full interview is coming tomorrow
exclusively to the Premium Feed.
You can sign up by going to todayindigital.com
slash premium feed. There's also a link in the episode notes. Sign up today to get 50%
off your first month. That's todayindigital.com slash premium feed.
And finally, Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover of Twitter is currently under review by the FTC,
following concerns about the acquisition's impact on, wait for it, free speech.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will decide in the next month
whether it will pursue an in-depth antitrust investigation.
This news coming from Bloomberg.
This would delay the closing by months and could trigger even more uncertainty in Twitter's ad business.
The FTC declined to comment on the matter.
For his part, Musk has not responded to requests for comment, and he hasn't tweeted about it yet.
Today apparently is the day.
I know, I'm talking about this forever.
The hot tub, yes.
Today apparently we are getting the official letter from the senior engineer.
We had the deck work done.
We had it reinforced.
We had the junior engineer come and sign off on everything.
We've been waiting a week, more than a week, for this junior engineer to get it on the desk of the senior engineer who can sign off on it.
And finally, I will have a piece of paper in my hands that says if this deck collapses under the weight of the hot tub, I can sue someone.
That's basically what I'm looking for, essentially.
So hopefully, end of the day, you'll know if you'll follow my Twitter because that will be all I am talking about.
And my Twitter account is at Todd Mathen.
Also, if you've got something you want to get out to the thousands of people who listen each day, I will read your classified ad right here.
It's just 20 bucks.
You can book it online.
Link in the show notes.
Today in digital marketing is produced by Engage Q Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunami First Nation on Vancouver Island in Canada.
Our associate producer is Steph Gunn.
Production coordination by Sarah Guild.
Podcast music licensing by Source Audio.
Ad coordination by Red Circle, and our theme composer
Mark Blevis. He is one of my
closest friends, but
even he's feeling the hard sting of aging.
The other day he walked down the street
and he says, why am I soft in the middle
now? Why am I soft in the middle?
The rest of my life is so hard.
I'm Todd Maffin.
Have a restful weekend.
I'll see you on Monday.
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