Today in Digital Marketing - YouTube is the new Edgelord!!!!!!

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Friday, November 22, 2019. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Happy National Flower Day, Columbia. Today, YouTube is the new edgelord. Twitter finally fixes their authentication quagmire. It's been a bad week for somebody at Google. And some Black Friday advice, whether you are in e-commerce or not. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:24 YouTube CEO put out one of her regular platform updates, covers off the stuff you'd expect to find in there, monetization features, them trying to clamp down on unnecessary copy strikes, that sort of thing. But buried near the bottom of the announcement is this very interesting note. She says that YouTube is considering revising its advertising policies to allow for more edgy brands, that's their word, to reach users who are okay with seeing content that is not perfectly sanitized. Quoting here from her update, We are running experiments to help match content that could be considered edgy with advertising that fits the advertiser's brand. As you know, yellow icons are a signal that only limited advertising can run on a particular video because of its content.

Starting point is 00:01:09 We are working with advertisers who are interested in edgier content, like a marketer looking to promote an R-rated movie, so we can match them with creators whose content fits their ads." This, of course, is welcome news to digital marketers like you and me. If you have ever tried to set up two-factor authentication on your brand's Twitter account, you know how much of a pain in the ass it is, mostly because it wants a mobile number to verify. So what mobile number do you put in? Your company's main number? Can't text a six-digit code to reception. Your cell number? You've already used that for your own personal account. You can't reuse it.

Starting point is 00:01:47 How about a virtual number? Now Twitter knows all those prefixes and blocks them. Honestly, it's been a real pain sometimes for brands to get this set up. Because also, what happens if you use your intern's cell number because it's the only one that's not attached yet, and she leaves? She's going to spend the rest of her life answering those, Hey, can you tell me the six-digit code that Twitter is about to text you? No. Well, today Twitter announced that it will finally let you use an actual authenticator app like Google Authenticator to verify your account. And while this might seem like a very nice thing that Twitter is doing for brands to make life easier, it's also possible that this is a reaction to the news last month that Twitter used people's phone numbers for advertising purposes.

Starting point is 00:02:26 Well, however it came about, good news there. Live Person, the conversational marketing tool, has launched two new functions, Email Connect and Social Connect. They let you manage conversations across different channels from its platform and across different sources,

Starting point is 00:02:42 emails, social media mentions, direct messages, all tied into the same platform that its Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, SMS, and Facebook Messenger data goes. Somebody at Google had a very bad week. It seems one of their new meta tags that defined image sizes had a bug in it, a big bug. If you set the max image preview tag to none, it would interpret that as you asking to be removed from Google entirely and would de-index that page. That bug has now been fixed. Which brings us to the lightning round. Sprout Social is reporting difficulties connecting to Google Analytics accounts. So if your GA reporting in Sprout looks a little wonky, that's why. Facebook is removing the ability for you to pull a viewer into one of your brand's live videos.

Starting point is 00:03:39 Not really sure why they're removing it. I found a cool little Mac tool for those of you who have Shopify stores. You can find it at storebar.app. It sits in your menu bar and always displays for you today's revenue. And Buffer Analyze users can now plot their Instagram story metrics on a chart and compare those metrics to another period. You will need to be on their premium plan to get that. And finally, this. A reminder, Black Friday is coming up in exactly one week, and there are millions of other brands all out there competing for ad space. So, two things.

Starting point is 00:04:14 First, if you don't need to sell things in the next week, seriously consider pausing your ads, since ad rates do tend to spike. But if you do need to sell things, make sure you submit your ad campaigns now. There are already delays of two, sometimes three days to get Facebook ad campaigns approved, and it is only going to get worse the closer we get. Civilization 6 just came out on Xbox today, so if I'm not here on Monday, you'll know what happened. If you're looking for some weekend listening, the premium feed has a bunch of stuff. A full description of Facebook algorithmic repair, a deep dive into the TikTok algorithm,

Starting point is 00:04:48 plus my exclusive interviews with Mitch Joel on the future of digital agencies and Scott Stratton on why the so-called social funnel will fail. Click the link in this episode's description

Starting point is 00:04:58 or visit todayindigital.com and look for the button that says premium episodes. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a great weekend. I'll see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - YouTube is the new Edgelord!!!!!!

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.