Today in Digital Marketing - Will This Podcasst Titel Rank Highr?

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

Facebook rolls out a new e-commerce feature just in time for the holidays… but — is it all it’s cracked up to be? A glaring security hole in a popular web site plugin exposed a half million web sites to danger. And ho is exactly is Richard Socher and why does he want to compete with Google?➡ Join our free Slack community! TodayInDigital.com/slack➡ Watch me produce this live at twitch.tv/todmaffin (about 12-3 PT weekdays)HELP SPREAD THE WORD:Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publishReview Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST:Source links and full transcripts: TodayInDigital.com Advertising: RedCircle.com/brands and TodayInDigital.com/adsClassified Ads: TodayInDigital.com/classifieds Leave a voicemail at TodayInDigital.com/voicemailTranscripts: See each episode at TodayInDigital.com Email list: TodayInDigital.com/email Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio)TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA:Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffinTod’s agency: engageQ.comTikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffinTwitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin (game livestreaming)Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://TodMaffin.com) and produced by engageQ digital (https://engageQ.com). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Summer of Loud, featuring Killswitch Engage, Beartooth, Parkway Drive, and I Prevail. Also, The Amity Affliction, The Devil Wears Prada, Alpha Wolf, and Kingdom of Giants. Summer of Loud, July 15th at Budweiser Stage. Get tickets Friday, February 28th at 10am at LiveNation.com Today, Facebook rolls out a new e-commerce feature just in time for the holidays.

But is it all it's cracked up to be? A glaring security hole in a popular website plugin exposed a half million websites to danger. And who exactly is Richard Socher? And why does he think he can compete against Google? It's Tuesday, December 8th, 2020. Happy Romanian Constitution Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Back in the day, one of the lesser known SEO tactics was to introduce deliberate misspellings of your desired keywords into your website. The idea being that if someone's looking for shoes and accidentally spells it S-H-O-O-S, well, probably aren't that many sites with that spelling and so you might rock it to the top of Google. But does it work today? Today's quiz, does deliberately putting spelling mistakes of keywords on your website help your search engine position, hurt it, or does it have no effect at all? The surprising answer at the end of today's episode. A huge update to Facebook's lesser-known child, WhatsApp. They have added carts to the app.

You know, like regular e-commerce stores have. Until now, WhatsApp has only been able to do a single purchase at a time, but now brands can sell multiple items at once through a WhatsApp message thread. Facebook says it will make it simpler for businesses to keep track of order inquiries, manage requests from customers, and close sales. But are the early tests underwhelming? Facebook's announcements on these things are almost always accompanied by two or three case studies with testing partners. I'm sure you've seen these.

In our tests with Acme Corp., they saw a 52% increase in sales and a 200% jump in ad recall. To be fair, Facebook did have a case study in this announcement, but it was pretty anemic. They showcased only a single business, a store in Indonesia that sells spice. They had early access to carts and no numbers, no metrics. The only thing they said in the case study was that the business, quote, told us how carts are a convenient way to

understand what the customer is ordering, unquote. Uh, okay. But how are your sales? Like, did your conversion rate pick up? Did your average order value increase? Honestly, the lack of this kind of case study information makes me think that this new feature may not be moving the needle on key metrics much. Anyway, time will tell, of course, and your own testing will tell even more. It's rolling out this week, just in time for the holiday season. A popular WordPress plugin has patched a huge security hole that would allow an attacker to gain control of your entire website. The EasyWP SMTP plugin has about a half

million active installations. The flaw would let a bad actor reset the admin password and then log in with it. That's really bad. That gives them complete control. In case you're curious, here's what happened. As with all websites, everything you do gets written to a log file, including when someone requests a password change. That's dutifully logged into a log file for later auditing or analysis. That log file, though, is not supposed to be publicly available. This one was. It was in a public folder without a blank HTML root file hiding the folder's contents.

So if you knew the URL of the folder, and it was consistent with all the installs, of course, you would trigger the password change request. Then just go to that directory with your browser, check the log file for the specific URL that did the change, copy that link, paste it into the browser, and presto, full access. All that to say, if you use the EasyWP SMTP plugin, be sure you have updated to version 1.4.2 or higher. 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. 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. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. I'm a pretty entrepreneurial guy. I started this agency more than 10 years ago. I once founded an artificial intelligence firm that went public in under a year.

But if there's one business I wouldn't think of going up against, it's Google. I think Google has the whole search engine thing down by now. That's probably not something I'd want to compete against. Don't tell that to Richard Socher, the former chief scientist at Salesforce, who says he's building his own search engine to compete against Google. It's called you.com. That's Y-O-U dot com. I'd love to know what he paid for that domain name. We don't know a lot about it. He talks in grand terms about wanting it to be a more trusted source of information, less clickbait, more kindness, less misinformation, that kind of thing. Sounds like the first focus may be on a consumer-focused search tool,

maybe help with complex consumer purchases where the buyer has to keep several tabs open and jump between them to compare products. He also talked about wanting to not rely on advertising or selling user data for revenue, which I guess only leaves two revenue models, pay for search, which only anyone would do, or I don't know, naming rights. How would that work? Hey, honey, can you check this for me on the u.com brought to you by Honda search engine for me? There's also some hints that you can have your own custom u.com brought to you by Honda search engine for me? There's also some hints that you can have your own custom you.com website address. No idea why you'd want

that, but who knows? Other than that, we don't know a lot. Not how much money they've raised, not how many employees they have. But if you're interested, you can go to you.com, that's Y-O-U dot com, and sign up for early access. Oh, and the answer to the quiz. Can inserting deliberate misspellings of keywords on your website improve your site's ranking? Searchenginejournal.com has a nice piece about that today, along with some interesting search engine history. But in the end, they say, quote, the script has flipped a bit on misspellings. As Google and Microsoft Bing look to reward higher quality websites, there's some theory in the SEO community that misspellings

can be seen as a low quality signal and may actually harm your site. Alright, so a short episode. It is a little, you know, there's not a lot of news in the, in kind of as we approach mid-December. I think it slows down for the holidays. But also there's another reason.

I bought Christmas lights and they just arrived today. Now hear me out on this. So these are the really cool ones that you can map to your cell phone, right? It comes with an app. I saw these last year on Instagram. They kept getting fed to me. I think because I have a bunch of hue lights in our house. Like I think, I think every light that is possible to have a hue light in our house has

one right now. Um, so I guess they were interest targeting me based on that. And they were really cool, right? You'd put up these Christmas lights and you could use an app and create your own patterns. And it came with a bunch of patterns. It looked really cool. And I saw that Instagram ad and I thought, Instagram ad, I don't think so.. Doesn't work like that in real life, I'm sure. Anyway, fast forward a year later and I follow this guy on TikTok who buys things from Amazon and then reviews them.

Waits a few months. Like tries it, you know, tries it out for a few months. So pretty decent reviews. And he loved it. So I went into the comments. I'm like, for real though, is this like, was this sponsored? Did you actually like this?

And tell me about the map. He says, no, no, they're real. So they arrived today. I'm looking forward to playing with them. And that's what I'm about to do right now after I upload the show. I mean, I've got work to do. Okay, see you tomorrow.