Today in Digital Marketing - The Rise of the Scripted Influencer

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Your next hire might be fictional... How to market products during a supply chain disruption... Twitter's new Sponsored Replies placement... Reddit tries to bring lurkers out of the dark... and more big moves in the livestreamed e-commerce space.• Get a Free 14-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter GET YOUR WORD OUT:• Ads as low as $20! See https://todayindigital.com/ads• Be a guest expert: https://b.link/pod-expert JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!- Slack: https://todayindigital.com/slack- Discord: https://todayindigital.com/discord- Reddit: https://todayindigital.com/reddit ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. Today, your next hire might be fictional. How to market products during a supply chain disruption. Twitter's new sponsored replies placement. Reddit tries to bring lurkers out of the dark. And more big moves in the live-streamed e-commerce space. It's Wednesday, October 13th, 2021. Happy National Lawyers' Day, Bolivia. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital,

and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 482. Her name is Sydney. She's a young woman in the U.S., has almost a half million followers on TikTok, and this week, she sort of blew up her sister's relationship. I attempted, and I guess succeeded, in catching my sister's guilty cheating. He was pursuing my roommate, Carmen, and he came over one night in hopes to be alone with her, whatever that means. But she set up a hidden Zoom call so we could see how far he would take things.

And the plan was that right before anything happened... This is all spelled out over the course of a series of videos, and honestly, it's been quite the soap opera to watch unfold. Mostly because it's been literally that. A soap opera. Sydney is played by a real person, but she's an actress.

Her account? Entirely fictional. But still, it's gaining big numbers. The account's only been live since June. Sydney is only one of a series of accounts owned by a startup called Forefront, which seems to be trying to capitalize on TikTok's discoverability to create monetizable characters. They have a couple of dozen or so of them on the platform so far and have raised $1.5 million in seed funding. Quoting TechCrunch,

Not all of the characters have been hits, and Forefront's team of writers and social media strategists have settled on nine characters, who they're looking to create an interconnected universe around, where the actors organically cross paths with each other. While Forefront's team plans out the character arcs, it's on the actors to shoot the videos themselves. The scripted content is often pretty soap opera-esque, but follows the format of popular videos on the platform, unquote. You might be wondering about disclosure, and the profiles of these characters all do have the word fictional in there somewhere,

but it's not quite clear as saying this is a fictional character account. TechCrunch again, quote, For now, the company is largely focused on building out its stars and their audiences while looking to push boundaries in how audiences interact with characters using tech products like conversational AI chatbots and polls to help direct the stories themselves, unquote. Which brings us to digital marketing. What are the ramifications for brands now

when we have to choose between real people and scripted pretend people? Pretend people who may indeed have a bigger follower base, more enthusiastically engaged fans, characters who've been designed from day one to be brand friendly, or maybe even brand specific, scripted from the get-go to eventually be pitched to a specific brand. Will their fans accept the sponsorship as part of the character's narrative arc? Or reject it, believing their favorite TikToker has sold out? Strange days ahead. I have a subscription to the Sirius XM Satellite Radio Network.

I listen to crappy 80s music all day long, but one of my favorite channels to occasionally tune into is Road Dog Radio. It is a radio station for truckers. Welcome to day two of the virtual Great American Trucking Show with your host, Kevin Rutherford. Sometimes it's music like Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, and other times it's talk shows. I like it because it gives me a view into a world that I would otherwise know nothing about.

The last month or so, though, tone and topics have taken a dramatic turn. Now, pretty much every time you tune in, it's all about the supply chain. And honestly, where better to get updates on that than from the people who are literally steering that supply chain. This holiday season is gearing up to be, well, messy. So messy that U.S. President Joe Biden today held a news conference about the topic of... Well, good afternoon, everyone. The supply chain. I know you're hearing a lot about something called supply chains

and how hard it is to get a range of things from a toaster to sneakers to bicycles to bedroom furniture. And that's why back in February. Consumers have picked up on it too. A survey from a shopping center trade group found that 75% of people they asked expected to start their holiday shopping earlier. The top reason? They're worried the products they want just won't be in stock or get to them in time. This is part of the reason why some of the big retailers like Target and Amazon have already held big sale events, the scope of which we usually only see around Black Friday. Indeed, in that survey from the ICSC, 42% of consumers said they plan to take advantage of early deals and promotions. Some advice I'm seeing in the various Slack groups is that consumers seem less concerned about price. In fact, 78% of those in the ICSC study said they will spend as much or more than they did last year.

So you may want to test messaging based more around, yes, it's in stock and yes, we can deliver it to you this week, rather than around discounting. And while the anti-vaxxers may be loud, they are solidly in the minority. Almost two-thirds of consumers polled said they feel comfortable shopping in stores as long as there are health and safety precautions in place. An interesting new ad placement option for Twitter, sponsored replies. This option will let your message appear within the reply threads of tweets, not actually let you promote your own actual reply to a tweet. The test is underway now in all countries in their mobile apps. You may not see these if you're not

in the limited test group, though. As for the placement itself, the ads will appear after the first, third, or eighth reply under a tweet. This is similar to Reddit's placement within post comments that it launched last month. One of the more interesting twists here, Twitter's head of product revenue says the original tweet creator will probably be able to opt in to getting a cut of revenue from ads that show up in their discussion thread. Quoting social media today, for example, right now, when a tweet goes viral,

you'll often see the tweet creator then add in an additional reply, highlighting their SoundCloud or a charitable cause, which they can then bring more attention to as a result of that tweet. But what if you could directly monetize all your viral tweets and get paid for their performance? Ideally, through this process, you wouldn't need to opt in to monetize all your tweet replies. And of course, there would be a reply threshold to qualify for this display anyway. But maybe if you could turn it on for certain tweets, that could be a big winner for the app and could provide even more incentive

for users to try to go viral with their witty responses and takes, unquote. This might even apply some pressure to other platforms to find a way to share the money. Can you imagine a world where Facebook group admins get a cut of the money spent on ads that are shown in their groups? Or maybe brands would be able to buy their way

into a specific viral tweet thread. Twitter says they'll be testing this for the next few months. 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. I always get excited to hear about new post formats on the social channels, not because they're novel, but also those channels often give the format an algorithmic boost

to entice you to try it out. Reddit today announced a new post type called predictions. Predictions allow users to guess the answers to questions like which character will meet their fate in the next episode or what will the Bitcoin price be on Monday. Reddit doesn't always move quickly, and this is the first new post format they've brought to the platform in almost two years.

They say they hope lurkers who don't engage in discussions will be tempted to engage with this. It is a little more complicated to set up than it seems, though. A subreddit mod will first have to create a predictions tournament, which is essentially a series of questions. There's no limit to how many questions can be in a tournament. Each participating user will get 1,000 tokens when they join the tournament, and they will bet with those tokens,

which will have no other use or value outside this whole predictions thing. But if your brand runs a subreddit that has more than 10,000 members, you will have access to it. This might be something to explore and perhaps have some fun with. To e-commerce live streams now. TikTok is adding some new controls for accounts that go live.

You'll be able to mute comments from individual viewers for a period of time ranging from five seconds to five minutes or the whole rest of the current live stream. Quoting the company, Now, the host or their trusted helper can temporarily mute an unkind viewer for a few seconds or minutes, or for the duration of the live. If an account is muted for any time, that person's entire comment history will also be removed. Hosts on live can already turn off comments or limit potentially harmful comments using

a keyword filter. We hope these new controls further empower hosts and audiences alike to have a safe and entertaining live stream. Unquote. If it hasn't become apparent to you yet, TikTok is marshalling all their resources behind live streaming e-commerce. They've added partnerships with big brands and added a live moderators option in July.

It's also been asking people who've posted crappy things in the chat to consider rephrasing their comments to be, well, less crappy. TikTok says almost 40% of people who saw the would you like to rethink posting this dialogue box have indeed withdrawn and edited their comment.

Instagram, too, is bulking up its live offering today, announcing you can now schedule a live stream up to 90 days in advance. Also, it's getting ready to launch something called practice mode, which essentially will let brand managers and creators test out their connection and get a preview of the audio and video to make sure it looks good to avoid those three minutes of every live stream where the host says, can you hear me? Say hi in the chat if you can hear me. Instagram says live scheduling

will be available globally. After scheduling a stream, you'll be able to share the news through stories and feed posts. People can then set a reminder to get a notification when your stream starts. Instagram has been moving quickly on the video front. Earlier this month, we reported they've decided to drop the IGTV brand

and would merge those videos with the regular food. And finally, if you were having trouble getting onto Snapchat this morning, it wasn't just you. Parts of the platform suffered an outage for a few hours. Looks like it's working again. So I've started doing those live streams on my TikTok account again, which is called at today

in digital. I'm doing it while I'm walking on my treadmill. Weather got crappy here, so I got myself a treadmill. So I can't tell you exactly when I go live because it kind of varies. Honestly, it depends on how quickly I rage quit Overwatch. But it's probably, you know, I would say a fair bet is anywhere from about six o'clock Pacific to about nine o'clock Pacific. Somewhere in that range, I usually go live for half an hour. We talk digital marketing, trends, answer your questions about all sorts of stuff and just otherwise hang out. So again, that's on TikTok. The account handle is at today in digital. Talk to you tomorrow. walk close to me I am weak but thou

art strong