Today in Digital Marketing - This Law Firm Serves Terrible Chicken

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Get the entire show content, with links and images, as a daily email newsletter! Subscribe at TodayInDigital.com/newsletterWhat happens when you sue a customer for leaving a bad review? Will your brand’s content be caught up in Facebook’s algorithmic changes? An update on the future of TikTok. And Pinterest’s clever addition could help out content marketers.Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing us!About the Podcast:Join Our Free Slack CommunityGet this as a daily email newsletterAdvertising and ClassifiedsLeave a VoicemailFollow Tod: Twitter • LinkedIn • TikTok • TwitchToday in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital. 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

Today, what happens when you sue a customer for leaving a bad review? Will your brand's content be caught up in Facebook's new algorithmic changes? An update on the future of TikTok and Pinterest's clever addition could help out content marketers. It's Wednesday, February 10th, 2021. Happy Feast of St. Paul's Shipwreck, Malta. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Among the many things the engineers at Google Search obsess over is the user experience. That front page of theirs has to load within a tenth of a second. They've tested

slightly different shades of blue for the links. They've tweaked the fonts, or at least say they have. Honestly, I could never really see a difference, which is why it's especially weird to see Google's big announcement this morning for marketers, lead forms that pop open when someone taps an ad's headline. And don't get me wrong, this is a great product for us. It's just the implementation that's strange because users won't know if the tap on your ad's headline will go to your website or will pop up a mobile lead form. Either way, it's probably worth testing, especially if, until now, you've hosted these lead forms on your own website or you've used Facebook's version of this. To get started, add a lead form to a search campaign,

then go to the campaign settings and select the option to always show the lead form when someone interacts with my ad. After a potential customer submits a lead form, they can choose to visit your site or return to the search results page. If your brand has ever been on the receiving end of a negative review online, you'll know the feeling. It stings. And sometimes, people muse about maybe suing the person who left the review. In most cases, there's really nothing to sue over. People are allowed to express their opinion,

even if that opinion is, you suck. But in most countries, what you can't do is defame a person or a brand. In other words, claim something as fact, not opinion, that isn't true and would look bad in the eyes of others. But that's exactly what a brand said a British man did. That brand, I should point out, was a law firm. So maybe pick your targets better, buddy.

Anyway, this fellow was a former customer and he left a negative review of the law firm on the Trustpilot site accusing the firm of being, quote, another scam solicitor. The law firm sued for defamation, saying the number of leads they got dropped after he published the review, and they won. Although perhaps more by default than anything, the reviewer in question never showed up,

never sent a legal representative. He was ordered to pay £25,000. And in any other time, that's where the story would have ended. But we're in a different time now, one where people like to strike back online. And that law firm is now getting assaulted by negative reviews piling up from people who apparently thought the firm was wrong to sue. The reviews are mostly nonsensical. One guy complaining he ordered chicken and it came dry.

Others saying don't hire them because if they don't like you, they'll sue you. Facebook today announced it will start reducing the amount of political content in people's news feeds, all part of a test to see if the move makes the platform a less divisive place to be. Didn't we already hear this story? I feel like they announce this every month now. Anyway, the test countries will be Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia this week, and the U.S. following on later. They will measure effectiveness by doing short surveys with people whose feeds were in that test group.

But here's the warning. Even though your brand may have nothing to do with politics, you too could be swept up in this. Remember, Facebook's AI determines content by the only thing it has to work with, the words in your posts. Ask any advertiser who's in the environmental business what putting the word sustainability into ad copy does to their campaigns. In lots of cases, the campaign gets auto-denied because of insert random denial reason here. So, keep an eye on your copy, friends, and steer clear of anything that might even remotely resemble political language. With all the political chaos in Washington the last few months,

one big story seems to have dropped back in the public eye, that of the future of TikTok. Well, there's been a development. To bring you up to speed on this, as you probably know, former President Donald Trump threatened to ban the app. Then Oracle and Walmart bid to acquire the American part of TikTok. And that's where things seem to stall out with regulators as the Biden administration came in.

Here's where things stand now. The Biden team says the plan to force the sell-off has been shelved indefinitely. Quoting MarketingDive.com, there's still a possibility of TikTok working with a trusted third party to manage its data in the U.S., a role Oracle at one point led the path for, which could occur without a sale.

Walmart continues to work closely with TikTok. The retailer is offering warehouse and sales support to transactions conducted over the app while building out its marketing presence on the platform. Unquote. That's where things stand. I don't think anyone's surprised, really. One thing is certain, TikTok's stunningly accurate interest algorithm and the data it has on users is probably worth at least, what, a billion dollars by now? Probably more? A number that's only increasing as the company invests further into e-commerce. Some good news for content managers who work in the Pinterest space. The company this morning releasing a new widget for iOS devices.

Those are those blocks you can now put on your phone screen that show content. Pinterest edition is an interests widget. So how would you use it in marketing? Well, if you're a content manager who's often looking at Pinterest for inspiration or to jump on trends, this will keep fresh content front and center on your phone without having to go to the app to see it.

It launches with a range of interests, including beauty, home decor, food, men's and women's fashion, and quotes. Not directly related to digital marketing per se, but an update on an interesting rebranding story you might remember from last June. That's when many brands announced they'd be renaming their products owing to the brand's connection to slavery and racial stereotypes. One of the most significant changes was to be the table syrup brand Aunt Jemima. Yes, I said table syrup because I'm Canadian and we know what maple syrup actually is. Yesterday afternoon, we learned the new brand name for the product, Pearl Milling Company. It was to be named after the company that first

developed the self-rising pancake mix in 1889 and branded it as Aunt Jemima. The packaging looked pretty similar, but instead of a picture of a black woman, it now shows a drawing of a mill on the banks of a river. The new rebranded products should reach stores this June. The original Aunt Jemima, by the way, was said to have been a house slave on an American plantation who created a pancake recipe so good

that a company paid her in gold for it. That story turns out to have just been a marketing invention. There never was a real Aunt Jemima. It was named after a character in a minstrel show. And finally, a small bug over at Hootsuite this morning. Your scheduled posts may appear as published in Hootsuite, but some of them are not actually reaching the intended social profile. They know about it. They are working on it. You know, I've been trying to not look at the numbers of this podcast, you know, watch pot never boils, blah, blah, blah. But I gave in to temptation last night and discovered that in January, we hit 10,000 weekly downloads. It was only a year ago when I literally made a pie

to celebrate hitting 1,000. So thank you for everyone who reviewed us, has joined our Slack community, has joined our newsletter, or has even just listened. We have some big plans ahead, so stay tuned. Remember, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter too, complete with images, related videos,

links to dive deeper, and even newsletter exclusive content. And there is a free tier as well. You'll get a sample bonus issue once or twice a month. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. All right, that's it for today. Talk to you tomorrow. Have you got a temp-delate and tantalizing old plantation saying for us today, Aunt Jemima? Yes, sir.

One that's especially good these days is that folks who smiles at breakfast mostly don't never need no doctor. A good thing to remember.