Today in Digital Marketing - Twitter is Falling Apart at the Seams

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's Thursday, November 10th. Today, brand impersonations, more executives leaving, and now regulators are watching closely. Is this the beginning of the end for Twitter? Also, the new Pinterest app that went viral on TikTok. Is Amazon about to bail out on Alexa? Canva adds text to image AI. And a major programming announcement about the future of this very podcast.

Starting point is 00:00:26 I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing. Honestly, you have to wonder what Nintendo was thinking. Yesterday, with no context or reference to a forthcoming game or anything, Nintendo's social media team tweeted an image of their Mario character with his middle finger up. They left it up for hours. It got more than 2,300 retweets. Except it wasn't Nintendo that tweeted it, of course. It was Nintendo.

Starting point is 00:00:53 You can tell because it was their verified account. Confused? Welcome to the new Twitter, where anybody can now pay $8 to impersonate any brand they want. And a brief note here, if you're sick of the Twitter stuff and honestly could blame you, just skip to the 6 minute 50 second mark or premium members, just tap the next story in your chapters list. All right, if you'll recall our coverage yesterday,

Starting point is 00:01:14 Twitter's plan to combat brand impersonation was to offer a second verified badge, a gray one labeled official. But within hours of its rollout, Elon Musk canceled the entire plan. A manager scrambled to try to explain it, saying the plan was actually to start with government accounts, but even that, by the end of the day, appeared to be off. This left major government organizations, like safety groups, pleading to their followers on Twitter yesterday to be absolutely sure that the tornado warning they tweeted, the active shooter alert they tweeted, the North Korea missile alert they tweeted,

Starting point is 00:01:56 actually came from their real account. An account, of course, now almost indistinguishable from any imposter that comes along. LeBron James said yesterday he wanted to be traded. Rudy Giuliani tweeted out taking a crap. OJ Simpson admitted he was the killer all along. George W. Bush tweeted, I miss killing Iraqis, to which former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair replied, same, to be honest. Except none of those people actually tweeted that. Only the verified accounts with their names on it did. Near the end of the day, Twitter seemed to confirm that it had shelved the grey official badge entirely, tweeting, quote, we're not currently putting an official label on accounts, but we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception, unquote. At least I think they did, because Twitter also promoted a new program where you could get Twitter Blue for free and a free NFT if you just connect

Starting point is 00:02:40 your crypto wallet up to TwitterBlue.com? At least I think they did. Both those accounts were named Twitter, both had the same logo, and both were verified. The latter, of course, was a scammer, but it had 26,000 followers. How many of those people do you think understood the distinction? You might say, well, the username is obviously going to be different. Someone can't create the username Apple TV Plus if Apple already owns that. Except they can. And someone did. Here's how.

Starting point is 00:03:11 They used a capital I instead of the lowercase l in plus. The two usernames are completely indistinguishable from each other. We have them side by side in today's newsletter. I challenge you to tell them apart. What's Elon's take on all this? James Felton, a British author, asked Twitter's new owner what he thought of all the fake accounts. Musk replied with a pair of laughing emojis. So far, the only action Twitter seems to have taken is to temporarily prevent new accounts, those created from yesterday onward, from buying

Starting point is 00:03:45 the blue checkmark. And then it got worse. Overnight, we learned that Twitter's most senior cybersecurity director had resigned. Then the company's chief compliance officer quit. Then its chief privacy officer quit. TechCrunch this morning noted, quote, it's not immediately clear who is responsible for Twitter's day-to-day security operations following these departures. TechCrunch this morning noted, Of course they didn't. There are almost no communications people left. Speculation is the departures are related to a decades-old agreement with the American Trade Regulator, which had accused Twitter of letting cybercriminals access internal systems and user data. Again, tech crunch.

Starting point is 00:04:30 Quote, the decree mandates that Twitter establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program to be audited every decade. It's not clear how Twitter maintains that compliance with the FTC without a company security lead in place. One employee said in a company Slack channel that it was for Twitter engineers to self-certify compliance with the FTC, unquote. The FTC said this morning, we are tracking developments at Twitter with deep concern. Then, at about three in the morning Eastern time last night, Elon Musk, for the first time since he bought the company, spoke directly to employees via an email. It reads in part, Sorry that this is my first email to the whole company, but there is no way to sugarcoat the

Starting point is 00:05:17 message. Frankly, the economic picture ahead is dire, especially for a company like ours, that is so dependent on advertising in a challenging economic climate. Moreover, 70% of our advertising is brand rather than specific performance, which makes us doubly vulnerable. This is why the priority over the past 10 days has been to develop and launch Twitter Blue verified subscriptions. Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscriptions. Starting tomorrow, everyone is required to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week, unquote. Amidst all the chaos, people are trying to find a Twitter alternative. I mentioned Mastodon earlier in the week.

Starting point is 00:06:01 A different project is being worked on by a guy named Gabber Caselli, who sold his advertising startup to Twitter, then became a group project manager there, and later became the director of Google's new product experimentations team. What's interesting about his early work is he's doing most of the planning in a Google Doc that anybody can view. We created a short link for you at b.link slash new Twitter. There's no name yet, no anything really, but many people in the industry are watching it closely, if for no other reason than Gabber's track record. Today he tweeted, I'd been thinking about new Twitter for a while. A couple of friends of mine still at the company were laid off last week,

Starting point is 00:06:37 so I thought to myself, this is the thing I've been thinking about for so long. Maybe this is the time, unquote. At least, I think he did. Hello to those of you who skipped. Welcome to the 6 minute and 50 second mark where there is gloriously no Twitter news. We'll start with Pinterest's new collage making app called Shuffles, which has now come out of hiding. The app became a thing when TikTok users started using it to make videos. Even though it was still in limited release, it became the number one lifestyle app on the US App Store in August, quoting TechCrunch. To use Shuffles, users build collages using Pinterest's own photo library or by snapping photos of objects they

Starting point is 00:07:19 want to include with their iPhone's camera. Pinterest also built a technology that allows users to cut out objects from their own photos, their Pinterest boards, or by searching for new pins. This works like iOS 16's image cutout feature, where you can copy and paste an object from a photo into other apps. Shuffles makes this cutout process a bit easier as it automatically identifies the object in the photos to make them available for pasting into your collages. You can also choose to add effects and motion to your images to make them shake, spin, pulse, swivel, and more. These effects can be applied to individual items as well. For example, you could add an image of a record player, then animate it so it actually spins, unquote. Pinterest says the

Starting point is 00:07:59 app is still in testing. They are releasing it, though, on iOS in the US, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, on iOS in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. 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. 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 cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy.

Starting point is 00:08:54 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. Amazon is cutting back on big projects in light of the economy, and its flagship Alexa business may be swept up in it. The Wall Street Journal reporting today that the company's devices units, where Alexa lives, had an operating loss of more than $5 billion this year. According to the Journal, Amazon is currently considering whether it should

Starting point is 00:09:31 focus on trying to add new capabilities to Alexa. Adding capabilities would require greater investment, and many customers use Alexa for only a few functions. Amazon has also told employees in certain other unprofitable divisions to look for jobs elsewhere in the company because the teams they were working on were suspended or closed, unquote. In response to media inquiries, the company said, well, you'd expect it would say they're optimistic. Business is as good as ever, yada, yada. Amazon shares rose by more than 4% today after the journal's report on the cost cutting review. And that will bring us to the lightning round. YouTube has expanded its comment translation tools.

Starting point is 00:10:13 Last September, they launched the ability to translate comments within the app. It's now adding comment translations to their YouTube Studio mobile app as well. They're also expanding their Smart Replies experiment, which is similar to those suggestions you see below some short Gmail messages. Things like thank you to and more to come are now buttons to click and immediately post. Canva is the latest creative platform to add a text to image AI tool. It's a version of the open source system known as stable diffusion with a few brand safety filters thrown in for good measure. Canva says all its users will be able to make up to 100 images a day with the tool. And finally, Reddit is rolling out a new community muting feature.

Starting point is 00:10:52 This is for individual users, by the way, not brands. It lets users mute an entire community, so they will no longer see posts from that subreddit in their notifications, home feed, or popular feed. You can still participate in communities you have muted. Okay, a couple of programming notes. First, tomorrow is a stat holiday here in Canada known as Remembrance Day, so there'll be no show tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:11:17 Also, tomorrow, my wife and I leave for our first holiday in like five years. We're going down to the Caribbean. Yes, the one with the hurricane currently circling over it. Normally when I'm out, our associate producer, the intrepid Steph Gunn, hosts the show. But we've had to shuffle some people around our agency to handle some client work. Steph has been seconded agency side, for instance. So next week, there will be no newsletter and no regular shows, but you will still be getting an episode every day. We have lined up a week's worth of deep dive interviews with topic experts, marketing scientists, and so on.

Starting point is 00:11:55 Monday, a look into the fake review business and how it affects online merchants and social media managers. Tuesday, an in-depth look into TikTok's discovery algorithm and the SEO secrets to getting your TikTok videos to be more visible there. Wednesday, Google Ads in Review, Jill Saskin-Gales will recap the last 12 months of changes on that platform and walk us through what she thinks next year will hold. Thursday, how to use humor when replying

Starting point is 00:12:23 to negative comments on social media. I'll be speaking with a marketing science who just did a huge study on that. And Friday, Andrew Hutchinson from socialmediatoday.com will give us his predictions of what 2023 will hold for digital marketers, e-commerce merchants, social media managers, and the rest of us, it will be an information-packed week. So that will do it for the week then. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by Engage Q Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn. Production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Podcast music licensing by Source Audio.

Starting point is 00:12:58 Ad coordination by Red Circle. And not many people know this, but our theme composer, composer mark blevis is one of the few executives still left inside twitter i asked him just this morning if he was thinking about leaving and he was pretty ambivalent he told me if there is freedom within there's freedom without try to catch the deluge in a paper cup again Again, no show tomorrow. All next week, the deep dive episodes. Then I'll be back the week after. Let's all hope there'll still be a Twitter to make fun of. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 00:13:32 And as Elon Musk once tweeted, don't wreck the place when I'm gone. That's a pretty good heart. At least I think he did.

Today in Digital Marketing - Twitter is Falling Apart at the Seams

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