Today in Digital Marketing - When Good Buzz Goes Bad

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, a surprising study finds your brand's support of social movements might be hurting you. Also, are you wasting your influencer marketing budget? A huge vote of confidence for a new third-party cookie replacement? Amazon's new warehouse service? And Meta moves out of neighborhoods. It's Friday, September 2nd. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. You've heard the advice before. Make sure your brand is supporting some social causes

Starting point is 00:00:29 and talk about that support on your social media. Doing so is basically a free pass to better brand perception, right? Take the recent Black Lives Matter movement. Did your brand donate? Did you put related hashtags on some tweets? Maybe even turned your channel over to a black influencer? You should be good. Or should you? What if the advice we've been given all this time about support for social causes has been wrong? So wrong, in fact, it's actually been hurting your brand. Yang Wang is an assistant professor of marketing at the Fox School of Business at Temple University. He and his colleagues have just published some new research in the Journal of Marketing Science. His paper is called How Support for Black Lives Matter Impacts Consumer Responses on Social Media. I spoke with him recently and asked him to tell me what happened to brands Instagram accounts

Starting point is 00:01:19 when they participated in the recent Blackout Tuesday movement. Between brand comparison, what we showed is that the brands Instagram accounts lost followers relative to their Twitter accounts. And this is, we think, pretty good causal evidence of participation effects negatively impacting how consumers are engaging with your brand. This is sort of isolated to instances where lots of other brands are also simultaneously supporting BLM. So in the case where there's few brands supporting it, we don't see much of a negative impact. But when lots of brands are doing it, the brands that choose to participate tend to get backlash. It seems so counterintuitive. Why do you think this is happening? Consumers are not naive, right? They

Starting point is 00:02:05 can understand when brands are sort of taking advantage of the moment and not really being authentic to their typical operations, right? So maybe you've never supported anything like this before. And because everybody else is doing it, right, the perception is that, you know, you're just joining on the bandwagon or jumping on the bandwagon. Our full conversation goes deep into detail on this topic, covering things like the surprising way that slacktivism can actually help your brand, the difference between politically right-leaning and left-leaning consumers, what effect this has beyond social, like to sales numbers and stock price, and whether their findings can also apply to other social

Starting point is 00:02:44 causes like LGBTQ issues or the US abortion debate. Our full conversation with the answers to all those questions and a lot more is coming tomorrow exclusively to the premium podcast feed, which to celebrate our 700th episode is on sale for $7 a month. That's a 30% discount that offer expires

Starting point is 00:03:02 at the end of the weekend. Tap the link in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash premium feed. The Premium Podcast. No ads, earlier release time, better audio quality, deep dive weekend episodes, and so much more. Are you wasting your money on influencer marketing? If you're primarily using influencers to boost awareness organically, an interesting piece up at Media Post today suggests you might be. The article discusses

Starting point is 00:03:29 three steps to getting the most out of influencer marketing, content creation, amplification, and the impact on sales. On content creation, quoting the piece, brands can take a strongly performing piece of influencer content and insert it into an ad unit or put it on their website, and that content will outperform content that the brand creates for itself. Still, when the brands just focus on awareness, they are not realizing the full value of that content and how it can impact sales, unquote. On amplifying content, the author reminds us that it's important to negotiate the rights to use the content and make it part of your media budget and push that content out. The piece also notes that brands need to balance the influencer's understanding of the audience

Starting point is 00:04:09 with the company's objectives. The best influencers understand the brand's needs and how to portray them to their followers so they can drive results. And finally, on the impact of sales, brands are seeing more value in using influencers for ongoing campaigns rather than one-off campaigns. Again, quoting MediaPost,

Starting point is 00:04:28 This can be even more effective when activating multiple influencers as part of the marketing mix because they each have their own audience. Conversations generated on social work in tandem with top-line efforts to inspire action. Creating a groundswell of conversation helps support the brand message and leads to the third part of value, the impact on sales. This strategy can take a brand from awareness to purchase in just one piece of content, unquote. The article was written by Eliza Freud. You can find it at mediapost.com. Look for the article called How Brands Are Wasting Their Influencer Marketing Budgets. In third-party cookie replacement news, a huge global advertiser has backed one company's replacement for the cookies, and it's not Google's version.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Yesterday, Procter & Gamble announced its support of Unified ID 2.0. That is the identity framework developed by the Trade Desk. As cookie-less environments like connected TV and mobile apps become more prevalent, Unified ID is trying to become the framework of choice for marketers looking for interoperability. The CPG giant joins a growing list of brands, agencies, streaming platforms, publishers, and ad tech companies supporting that identity framework, including Disney, Vox Media, and Amazon. 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

Starting point is 00:06:11 today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Speaking of Amazon, yesterday the company announced a new resource to help sellers who have supply chain challenges. The e-commerce giant's new service is called Amazon Warehousing and Distribution. It lets third-party sellers use its distribution centers for long-term inventory storage. With the service, sellers can use dedicated purpose-built facilities for bulk inventory storage and automated distribution. Amazon says storing inventory at these distribution centers will let sellers seamlessly replenish their inventory in Amazon's main fulfillment

Starting point is 00:06:51 network. They'll also be able to consolidate their global inventory to manage on the Amazon seller central platform. Currently, this service is available to fulfillment by Amazon sellers, but it will be expanded in 2023 to include wholesale customers and even brick and mortar stores. Another product is being sent to the Meta graveyard. Today, the company announced it's pulling the plug on Instagram. No, I'm just kidding. On Neighborhoods, which is its clone of the Nextdoor app. Actually, they're doing it before most users even got to try it.

Starting point is 00:07:27 The feature had been tested in Canada and the U.S. somewhat quietly since 2020. It will now be killed off on October 1st. Neighborhoods let users create special profiles that they could populate with custom bios in their interests. But most users just opted to use Facebook groups to post updates with their local community instead. Now, the company has started notifying neighborhood groups that its test is coming to an end. According to TechCrunch, Facebook said it originally invested in the project because it saw how popular local content was on its platform. But Facebook realized the best way to move forward was to let people continue to use Facebook groups as they always have been. Marketers and brands continue to spend more on influencers, but when it comes to types of content,

Starting point is 00:08:15 brands have a lot of options. So what are brands asking creators to post? According to a new study, the top content types marketers say they hire social media creators to produce are educational content, unboxing content, or testimonials. While the top content formats marketers partner with on creators vary by platform, the top seem to be story posts for Facebook and Instagram, links in the bio for TikTok accounts, branded shoutouts on YouTube, and branded tweets on Twitter. And where are creators mostly posting brand partnership content? For maximum reach, nearly half of brands have the creator posted on their own account, compared to about a third that posted both on the creator's account and on the brand account, and only a quarter only posted on brand pages and accounts. The data comes from Sprout Social's survey of more than 500 marketers.

Starting point is 00:09:12 And finally, if you're looking to capitalize through smart speakers, apparently all you need to do is record a new brand jingle about poop and make it available for streaming. BuzzFeed reports how a few search-savvy musicians have figured out how to game smart speakers, thanks to kids shouting the word poop into smart speaker devices. Several creators told BuzzFeed

Starting point is 00:09:37 that their biggest source of revenue is Amazon Music, the default player for Alexa. One group, called the Toilet Bowl Cleaners is from musician Matt Farley, whose SEO gaming song is called Poop Poop Poop Poop Song. He estimates it's been streamed 8 million times on Amazon Music. For many musicians, there's a clear difference between the streams they get from Amazon versus other platforms. Quoting Farley on Amazon Music, 80% of my earnings come from poop songs. Meanwhile, on Spotify, poop songs only make up about 50% of my earnings. Unquote.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Clearly, I missed my calling. Don't forget, this weekend is your last chance to get the premium podcast for only $7. That's 30% off. It is an ad-free feed with weekend chapters, all sorts of upgraded doodads like links in the show notes, audio chapters, and so on. Tap the link in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash premium feed. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Sunimic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is Steph Gunn, production coordinator Sarah Guild, podcast music licensing by Source Audio, ad coordination by Red Circle.

Starting point is 00:11:06 And not many people know this, but our theme composer, Mark Blevis, is one of the world's largest collectors of classic cars. Like Jay Leno asks him for advice. In fact, just the other day, he was showing me his latest. As soon as the garage door opened, he said, hop in my Chrysler. It's as big as a whale and it's about to set sail. I'm Todd Maffin. It's Labor Day on Monday, which means no show that day. So have a restful long weekend, and I will see you on Tuesday. Dream living, dream far That's who we are

Starting point is 00:11:45 That's free, that's easy We got to live the dream

Today in Digital Marketing - When Good Buzz Goes Bad

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