Today in Digital Marketing - When Your Digital Marketing Campaign Goes Too Far

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today, how far is too far when you're planning a digital marketing stunt? Why removing Shopify's footer text might move your store higher in the search engines? And recovering from a website hack, advice from Google on restoring your ranking. It's Friday, January 29th, 2021. Happy National Puzzle Day! I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing with a quick warning to parents. One of the clips I'll be playing in today's show has some profanity. In the world of marketing, there are brilliant branding decisions

Starting point is 00:00:34 and there are terrible branding decisions. And today, Pinterest has opted to go down in history for the latter. The company has launched a new feature which they are calling Pinterest Story Pins Following Streams. That's the name. Story Pins Following Streams. As much as fleets was kind of goofy, kind of makes you wish they'd have come up

Starting point is 00:00:57 with something like that. Anyway, what are these Story Pins Following Streams? Quoting the company, Story Pins Following Streams are a place for pinners to see new story pins from the creators they follow right at the top of the home feed. In this immersive stream, pinners can find fresh story pins and even find new creators to follow through the Discover Creators icon.

Starting point is 00:01:19 So, yeah, unless I'm missing something huge, Pinterest now has a stories feed across the top, just like everyone else. Of course, from a marketing perspective, there is some value to it. Increased discoverability, blah, blah, blah. But in case you market on Pinterest, there you go. A rather strange marketing stunt this week from Pringles. The company paid a video game streamer to participate in a somewhat cringy skit of sorts. She streams on Twitch. Here's how it went.

Starting point is 00:01:53 She was playing a zombie game, eating from a Pringles can, when during the game, one of the zombies on screen appeared to reach out toward her. Probably. Then audiences saw her actually get attacked in her house by a guy dressed up as a zombie. The camera crashed to the floor and when it came back, the zombie now has the Pringles can, and the live streamer looks rattled. Judging from the chat room, it took a minute or two before people watching realized it was a skit. Remember, video game streamers are often targeted in real life by viewers. Sometimes pranksters will swat them, phoning the police, telling the cops there's someone with a gun at the house,

Starting point is 00:02:45 all so that the person can watch on stream as the police bust in. Put your hands up! Put your hands up! Get on the ground! Get on the ground now! Get on the ground! Put your hands behind your back. Sometimes it's even more dangerous. Drive-by shootings of streamers' houses. Ladies and gentlemen, I've got to fucking end the broadcast right now. Someone shot at our house. drive-by shootings of streamers' houses. Upstairs, right? You're driving by, right? You fuck, you pussy!

Starting point is 00:03:27 So it was a risky move, I thought, for Pringles and their agency to essentially fake an attack on a streamer. A young woman streamer at that. Turns out they're trying to develop this zombie who they named Frank as a kind of recurring character in other marketing campaigns. Quoting MarketingDive.com, Frank will also take over the Twitter accounts of Pringles in the UK and of Raw Fury, the developer of the Western-themed shooter West of Dead, to interact with gamers in Europe. Frank will return to the game and become a permanent character who meets players in its opening saloon."

Starting point is 00:04:00 In the end, of course, everyone in chat realized it was a skit, a kind of cringey marketing stunt, but it was interesting to see the efforts brands are going to, to break through the clutter in the gaming market. If you run a Shopify store, you'll know that in the bottom left corner, they've jammed a brand link there, powered by Shopify. It's not a big link, and most people who run their brand stores are probably happy to leave it there. But an interesting blog post this week suggested you might want to take it off. The post is at joeyoungblood.com. Here's why he suggests you consider removing it. Quote, first, the badge includes a link back to Shopify's homepage.

Starting point is 00:04:41 This takes a little bit of SEO value and sends it to Shopify, lowering the value of each one of your pages. Even if that value reduction is incredibly small, it could be the difference between ranking on a competitive query in the visibility range and not getting any traffic, unquote. Side note here, I'm not entirely sure this is accurate, that having an outbound link will reduce your Google juice, but anyway, onward. Quote, second, having this badge visible could lead to an increase in hacking attempts, phishing attacks, and targeted spam. All these can originate from someone scouring the web looking for Shopify websites. Then once they find them, they can either look for ways to hack, scam, or spam you. Removing the badge can make your site less likely to end up on a nefarious actor's list of sites to try to attack or exploit. And third, most shop owners want full control over the aesthetics of their site, even the rarely seen footer.

Starting point is 00:05:32 Removing the Powered by Shopify badge could be seen as a way to improve the look and feel of the site and maintain the brand image, unquote. The blog post has step-by-step instructions. Essentially, the trick is to use the language translation feature to replace that text with a blank field. The post is linked in the show notes if this is something you'd like to do. So while having a link back to Shopify may or may not negatively affect your Google ranking, one thing we know definitely does, having a hacked web page on your site. The most popular CMS, WordPress, is pretty secure, but there are always exploits. And with every theme you add, every plugin you install,

Starting point is 00:06:13 you increase the odds of someone hacking your site, especially if you don't update those themes or plugins. While Google search engineer John Mueller has shared some best practices to follow when cleaning up and recovering from hacks, quoting searchenginejournal.com, As a first step, use the URL removal tool as it will immediately hide the pages in search results. The pages will drop out of Google's index when the site is crawled again, and Mueller says search results should go back to normal quickly.

Starting point is 00:06:40 Depending on the damage done during the hack and how long the site was hacked for, it could take months to recover. Site hacks can sometimes exacerbate existing issues on a site, which can cause Google to reconsider how the site should be shown in search. Those issues could be holding the site back from making a full recovery in search results. While cleaning up a site's hack, it's worth making an effort to improve the quality of the site at the same time. And finally, just a heads up coming next week, a deep dive into the forthcoming changes to iOS devices, changes that absolutely will change the way you run social ad campaigns. One of the best in the business, John Loomer, will join me for a full interview covering everything you need to know.

Starting point is 00:07:28 While I'm learning lots about what you like, what you don't like through the listener survey, one thing a lot of you asked for was direct links to more information about the stories we cover. Those links have always been there, but they've been in the transcripts, which has been a tap or two away. So as of today, you will find links to more information about the stories we cover right in the show notes. We've also cleaned up the show notes overall. Still a chance for you to win one of those three $50 Amazon gift certificates? All you need to do is fill out the survey by the end of the weekend. A link is in the notes, or you can go to todayindigital.com slash survey.

Starting point is 00:08:03 Well, that's it for the week. Our production assistant is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis. Music licensing by Source Audio. And this podcast is produced by our agency, EngageQ Digital. Find us at engageq.com. I'm Todd Mathen.

Starting point is 00:08:17 Have a restful and safe weekend, friends. I'll talk to you on Monday. I don't want these virgins. They are going to taste too sad. Oh, come on. Well, let's just eat the mean one. No, I know what you're bloody like. If you eat the these virgins. They are going to taste too sad. Oh, come on. Well, let's just eat the mean one. No, I know what you're bloody like. If you eat the mean one, you're going to be mean all evening.

Today in Digital Marketing - When Your Digital Marketing Campaign Goes Too Far

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