The Internet is For Porn - and Facebook Live Won't Change That

A few months ago, I wrote here about Periscope, Twitter's live video streaming service, which is catching fire this year with digital marketers across the globe. In that post, I discussed Periscope's potential for broadcasting on the go, and for the business potential to host live events like product releases, interact with prospects and clients, provide live customer support, etc.

Obviously, it only took a few months for the competition to catch up, and just this week, Facebook Live was launched. It is a Periscope clone in every way, except for the fact that it is deeply integrated with your Facebook friends list - and your Facebook advertising. Sure, some folks have thousands of Twitter followers, some celebrities even have millions, but the average number of Facebook friends a person has is just 200. There is just a greater degree of intimacy within a Facebook friends list than a Twitter followers list, and this almost-pornographic, voyeuristic quality is what is likely to make Facebook Live irresistible compared to Periscope's more impersonal "broadcast" vibe. In fact, even the New Yorker article I linked to above ominously announces "Now You Can Never Leave [Facebook]." It's the ultimate FOMO - who doesn't want to watch what's going on at a party you couldn't attend, or catch their ex making a fool of themselves at a bar, or participate in a buddy's celebrity sighting at an airport? Or whatever people end up choosing to stream live...

Which brings me to the potentially seedy underbelly of a service like Facebook Live, whose awesome power could have terrible side effects, because of course 1.5 billion people are on Facebook, and people are terrible, and terrible people have the same access to Facebook Live that you do:

The immediacy and intimacy of live broadcasting can be extremely powerful for politicians, musicians, and journalists to speak directly to you from around the world. But it could also be jarringly powerful for, say, a terrorist organization live broadcasting a beheading or a small porn business live streaming sex.

What Facebook didn’t mention is that if anyone can broadcast live, that means, well, anyone can broadcast live. (Remember Chatroullette? Yeah, people on the internet can be gross.) Even with standards in place, the live broadcast of dick vids, sex, beheadings, shootings, and their ilk seems inevitable. 

Imagine being an unwitting potential advertiser whose logo scrolls past an unsavory live hate speech, or torture / snuff film, or actual pornogoraphy! Oof. Business suicide. 

So what controls is Facebook putting in place to prevent this? Not enough:

The company understands that and says it’ll be largely up to people like you to report them to a global review team to stop them from spreading. Facebook has “Community Standards” (read: official policies) outlining in part what kind of stuff is banned from the platform, including nudity, hate speech, and graphic violence.

In other words, it will be up to you - to us - to stop crude behavior from popping up live on Facebook. But that's cold comfort! The power of LIVE is that its impact is immediate. Even if inappropriate videos are reported, they could already have gone viral. It would be too late for those who had unwillingly seen the graphic images. And here's the kicker:

Since Facebook defaults to saving the live video as a replayable one, unsavory “live” content can spread even after the broadcast ends. Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, told The New York Times that reviewing these kinds of reports typically take around 48 hours for safety issues. Since then, Facebook has tried to review (and, if needed, remove) most videos in under 24 hours, a spokesperson says. But, when it comes to stopping the spread of an unsavory livestream, even a 24-hour review period won’t be fast enough.

I think businesses need to be extremely wary of committing advertising dollars to the Facebook Live platform until its moderation capabilities and content standards can be tested in the wild. As we all know, the internet is for porn.

Branding in the Age of Social Media: Competing for "Crowdcultures"

Everyone should go read this super-insightful HBR article on how the very kernel and substance of branding and marketing have changed due to social media.

The thesis of the article is that human cultural innovation - long shaped by group differences since time immemorial (e.g., national borders, languages, religions) - has evolved to form "crowdcultures" that transcend these differences and and are now formed by global similarities instead, thanks to social media:

Historically, cultural innovation flowed from the margins of society—from fringe groups, social movements, and artistic circles that challenged mainstream norms and conventions. Companies and the mass media acted as intermediaries, diffusing these new ideas into the mass market. But social media has changed everything.
Social media binds together communities that once were geographically isolated, greatly increasing the pace and intensity of collaboration. Now that these once-remote communities are densely networked, their cultural influence has become direct and substantial. These new crowdcultures come in two flavors: subcultures, which incubate new ideologies and practices, and art worlds, which break new ground in entertainment.

In other words, businesses can no longer rely upon the oligopolies of mass media like television and newspapers to shape cultural consciousness and their brands -for example, like Coca-Cola once did with the incredibly popular campaign "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke", most recently featured in the Mad Men series finale:

Instead, brands need to compete to participate in subcultures like the once-oddball video-gaming-as-entertainment subculture of South Korea, which has now gone global with YouTube celebrities like PewDiePie. Compare PewDiePie, who cranks out inexpensive videos in his house, to McDonald’s, one of the world’s biggest spenders on social media. The McDonald’s channel (#9,414) has 204,000 YouTube subscribers. PewDiePie is 200 times as popular, for a minuscule fraction of the cost.

So, HBR's advice can be summed up thusly: compete for crowdcultures and innovate constantly.

To brand effectively with social media, companies should target crowdcultures. Today, in pursuit of relevance, most brands chase after trends. But this is a commodity approach to branding: Hundreds of companies are doing exactly the same thing with the same generic list of trends. It’s no wonder consumers don’t pay attention. By targeting novel ideologies flowing out of crowdcultures, brands can assert a point of view that stands out in the overstuffed media environment.

Invasion From The Skies: The First Example of Ads on Facebook Messenger

A few weeks ago, our classmate Katie Clark posted about how there was "No Sacred Place" left, because ads were coming to Facebook Messenger. Having opened up its Facebook Messenger Platform for developers to integrate their services into the mega-popular chat app, Facebook is gearing up for a future where it can mediate the interaction between users and businesses for a "fluid and centralized experience".

Well, today we have our first proper look at a real business using the app for advertising, and it is an invasion from the skies - KLM Royal Dutch Airlines:

KLM flyers will be able to automatically receive itineraries, flight updates, check-in notifications, boarding passes, rebook flights, and communicate with customer service all from Facebook Messenger.

I guess I see the use case for customer service, particularly for time-sensitive interactions such as flights. But this is not blazing a trail - after all, "live chat / help" modules on business websites have been ubiquitous for nearly two decades now. It is less easy to see how Facebook will achieve its goal of turning the app into a one-stop shop for e-commerce interactions / notifications such as tickets, invoices and confirmations - their stated objective earlier this year. I think people prefer to have a document "of record" in their email for this kind of stuff.

Maybe Facebook realizes this model isn't for all kinds of business marketing. I found this telling:

For now, Facebook said that it is being selective with businesses who can use Messenger to communicate with customers.
Airlines, however, could be a major use case for Messenger, according to Facebook’s vice president for messaging products, David Marcus. Marcus told USA Today that approximately 80% of passengers on planes traveling within the United States have the Messenger app installed on their smartphones.

Only time will tell whether the ephemeral interaction of a Facebook Messenger chat can supplant more tangible interactions like a phone call with a real voice at the other end, or even the more tangible record of an email in your inbox.

The Future of Email Marketing - Don't Be Lazy or Cheap

Email marketing feels like old news. Even our class on email marketing a couple weeks ago didn't do much to change my view on this - that email marketing flourishes because you can be lazy and cheap while doing it. Email marketing is simply a faster, scalable, nearly-free version of the direct mail (and junk mail) marketing we have been receiving in our letterboxes for many years.

(Sidebar: hundreds or even thousands of years, in fact. According to this, the first pieces of direct mail marketing may have been sent on papyrus in 1000 BCE, and were certainly a "mass-market" marketing device by the time printing became commonplace in the 17th and 18th centuries CE.)

Nonetheless, everyone would agree email itself is here to stay. So what does the future of email marketing look like? Litmus assembled 20 marketing experts to weigh in on the future of email marketing, say in 2020. 

In a nutshell, email marketing of the future will be more customized / hyper-personalized, more context-aware / artificially intelligent, more reliant on data from other marketing channels, and more heavily integrated with them. Marketers can therefore afford to be neither lazy nor cheap.

I found these observations the most interesting:

Paul Farnell, Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder, Litmus, predicts…
I BELIEVE EMAIL VOLUME IS GOING TO INCREASE DRAMATICALLY BY 2020, BUT IT WON’T FEEL LIKE IT. INBOXES WILL PRIORITIZE MESSAGES, MANY EMAIL INTERACTIONS WILL BE BRIEF, AND MANY EMAILS WON’T FEEL LIKE EMAILS AT ALL.

Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, predicts…
EMAIL READERS ARE GOING TO GET BETTER AND BETTER AT HELPING RECIPIENTS MANAGE THEIR EMAIL BY FACTORING IN CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION AND NO LONGER SIMPLY DISPLAYING EMAIL BY AN ARBITRARY FACTOR LIKE RECENCY.

To me this says marketers will have to adapt their content to the newest email technologies, such as Google's Inbox, Dropbox's Mailbox and other "intelligent" mail systems that are curating email differently than the past. More importantly, they will have to not just keep pace with, but maybe leapfrog the newest innovations in this space, all of which are geared towards smarter, more machine-intelligent controls and contexts for the email we receive:

Tim Watson, Email Marketing Consultant, Zettasphere, predicts…
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE WILL MANAGE AND CONTROL THE MESSAGING TO EACH INDIVIDUAL ACROSS CHANNELS, CREATING THE TRULY INTEGRATED EXPERIENCES THAT ARE CURRENTLY TALKED ABOUT A LOT BUT RARELY DELIVERED.

Eric Stahl, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, predicts…
EMAIL WILL LEVERAGE EVERY INTERACTION FROM THE INTERNET OF THINGS, LOCATION, BEHAVIORAL DATA, AND CUSTOMER PREFERENCES TO DELIVER MESSAGES TO THE CUSTOMER IN EXACTLY THE RIGHT CONTEXT.

This is a very different view of the world than email marketing has been in the past. It will have to be a more active and engaging channel, something resembling a bit more today's curated social media experience, if it is to continue to be relevant in 2020.

Party Down With Snapchat

In 2014, Snapchat unveiled "geofilters," a feature that made it possible to add image filters that would only show up if you were in a certain location. The initial idea was to use this for digital marketing purposes, and Snapchat sold geofilters to Starbucks, Youtube, Facebook and other advertisers who wanted to "take over" certain geographic areas, usually during corporate events.

A few weeks ago, Snapchat threw open this functionality to all members of the community, and what's more, they will let you pay for a temporary, on-demand geofilter for your next party or event. The idea is that you can create a piece of art or memorabilia and then share it with friends who can only see it when they're in that location. Think of "wedding Snapchat filters" as the next-generation wedding photobooth. Every attendee's camera can automatically have themes / styles applied and published to the event / geographic location, in a much more visual and unobtrusive manner than having to type out Twitter / Instagram hashtags on the dance floor.

Users can choose spaces that are a minimum of 20,000 square feet — about the size of an office — to a maximum of 5,000,000 square feet — roughly a few city blocks. The custom filters can stay live from an hour to thirty days, and Snapchat imagines they'll be used during weddings and other events. The filters start at $5, which is the approximate price for an eight-hour Friday event in a major city.

For smaller marketers and advertisers, this confers major benefits upon "brand activation" activities. Booths at tradeshows and areas in political conventions could have themed geofilters, for a pretty low buy-in. Sponsored events at bars / restaurants, entire block parties, even portions of gigantic events like Coachella or SXSW could be photographed and branded with specific designs, I could see immediate results for firms opening new retail locations, or having special sales days, etc. as well.

For Snapchat, this is a smart monetization move. If it's really as cheap and easy as it sounds, and they incorporate some way to limit the number of filters for population-dense areas, I can't see a reason why this wouldn't be a huge success.

Googlebot 2: Electric Boogaloo

This week, Google announced something potentially significant for mobile Web standards in general, and search engine optimization (SEO) in particular. They said that the Googlebot webcrawler code they use to index the internet would no longer represent itself to webpages (using the user-agent string) as an iPhone device running iOS 8.3, but as a Google Nexus 5X device running Android 6.0.1 instead.

It used to be the case that the mobile Safari browser (on iPhones) was the most representative of mobile web users, but in Google's determination, that is no longer the case. Although iOS and Safari have a large presence online, the sheer number of Android devices helps give them and Chrome (the Android browser) a bigger footprint.

I found this part most interesting:

Our evaluation suggests that this user-agent change should have no effect on 99% of sites. The most common reason a site might be affected is if it specifically looks for a particular Googlebot user-agent string. User-agent sniffing for Googlebot is not recommended and is considered to be a form of cloaking. Googlebot should be treated like any other browser.

Basically, this is yet another policing technique for Google to ensure that its searches remain relevant, and truly the best organic results climb its ranks, without gamesmanship.

The implications for SEO are obvious: Google searches will now favor results employing newer Web standards like CSS/HTML5, rather than pages mired in older gimmicks like JavaScript, image overlays and Flash. So along with keeping content, backlinks and metadata in mind, marketers need to keep an eye on the underlying code and rendering of their webpages as well.

Google Kills "Eyes Right"

In class, the professor talked about eye-tracking and how Google search results include a small block of PPC ads on the top of each page, and a much larger block of PPC ads on the right hand side of the page. Well, not for much longer.

According to Search Engine Land, Google is killing those ads on the right, and adding one more to those at the top of each search result page:

Google is rolling out a dramatic change that removes ads from the right side of its desktop search results, and places ads only at the top and/or bottom of the page. At the same time, the company says it may show an additional ad — four, not three — above the search results for what it calls “highly commercial queries.”

I was particularly surprised by this line:

... the layout is able to provide more relevant results for people searching and better performance for advertisers.

This implies to me that Google does not distinguish between advertisements and organic search results in any meaningful way, for the end user. I would expect them to further blur the line between paid search results and organic results in the future.

More importantly, this is perfectly in sync with Google's recommendation to new advertisers that they begin by paying for an ad campaign. Since one of the main factors for organic SEO is traffic, paying can help you start getting initial traffic as well as profiling your audience. Organic and paid search efforts will complement each other even more in a world where the "eyes right" block of ads is eliminated from search results.

I don't think I've ever clicked on any ads in the "eyes right" block, so it's probably not a huge loss... And I bet the ads which remain just got more expensive. Well played, Google.

Google PageRank - Have We Discovered The Secret Sauce?

We learned in class that although Google's PageRank is a proprietary set of algorithms, digital marketers have tested various hypotheses to come up with a pretty solid understanding of what techniques work best in order to pop higher on a Google search, and get to the first page.

I stumbled across a relatively recent study by Brian Dean of Backlinko and Eric Van Buskirk of Clickstream that analyzed 1 million Google search results (content, backlinks, even site speed) to answer the question: which factors correlate with first page search engine rankings?

Obviously, this isn't the first time someone has done this (a firm named Moz has run their own search engine ranking factor studies for years, and the professor shared this with us). What makes this one different is that it analyzed A LOT more search results (1 million searches vs. fewer than 20 thousand).

The key conclusions for me were:

• Get backlinks from other sites considered "authorities"
• Publish long-form content
• Put at least one image on your content
• Stop wasting time on title / tag / keyword optimization
• Spend time / money on optimizing the speed of your site

I quote their most interesting findings:

1. Backlinks remain an extremely important Google ranking factor. We found the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.
2. Our data also shows that a site’s overall link authority (as measured by Ahrefs Domain Rating) strongly correlates with higher rankings.
3. We discovered that content rated as “topically relevant” (via MarketMuse), significantly outperformed content that didn’t cover a topic in-depth. Therefore, publishing focused content that covers a single topic may help with rankings.
4. Based on SERP data from SEMRush, we found that longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results. The average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.
5. Content with at least one image significantly outperformed content without any images. However, we didn’t find that adding additional images influenced rankings.
6. We found a very small relationship between title tag keyword optimization and ranking. This correlation was significantly smaller than we expected, which may reflect Google’s move to Semantic Search.
7. Site speed matters. Based on data from Alexa, pages on fast-loading sites rank significantly higher than pages on slow-loading sites.

Periscope or Perish

A colleague recently mentioned Periscope during a meeting, so I took to Google and found this Forbes article on how this new service could become a pretty powerful tool for digital marketing.

Periscope (owned by Twitter ) is a live video streaming service aimed at mobile and is a sort-of mashup of YouTube, FaceTime and Twitter. Sort of like Snapchat, but with video, and sort of like Vine, but live. Basically you can broadcast your own live TV station right from your mobile device.

It enables you to "go live" via your mobile device anytime and anywhere. The app enables you to become your own on-the-go broadcasting "station", streaming video and audio to any viewers who join your broadcast. There is also an interactive component where users can “like” a broadcast by clicking hearts on the screen, get involved in the broadcast by commenting live, and share stations on Twitter.

So why could this be an important tool for businesses? Of all the possibilities, these two caught my eye. Forbes says:

Create Brand Release Videos 

Periscope is all about instant news, so a release of a product or service is a great time to create a live broadcast. You can simply have the CEO of your company making an announcement and explaining the process of creating the new product and/or any events happening to celebrate. This can be your first announcement and it can help you create a great video for later. 

Ask for Email Addresses During Your Broadcast 

As you create your broadcast, ask viewers to leave their email addresses in the comments so that you can create a Periscope mailing list.

In other words, you can have an Apple-style live keynote, at the cost of free. You don't need to rely on being picked up by a traditional TV / media source, or be time-lagged by YouTube and other non-live video sources. Also, you can make the broadcast truly interactive, with a quick and easy method of obtaining customer information and loyalty.

Business Blogs: Keep 'Em Clicking

The American Express OPEN program for small businesses has this great post about how to maximize the potential of a business' blog.

The part that caught my eye was a suggestion for how to keep visitors' eyes on your blog (and therefore on your website) for longer. Content marketing might pull a visitor to your site, but they might read one post and leave. This can be measured by the "bounce rate", the statistic that tells you if people are coming to your site to read one post and leave or if they’re viewing more than one page. Obviously the longer you keep visitors on your site, the more they can get to know your brand. 

Erika Napoletano says:

First, does every blog post you create link to another blog post? In the paragraph above, I linked to a previous article I wrote about Google Analytics. It’s relevant and gives you the opportunity to click through and get started using that tool directly. By linking to your previous content, you’re both giving your reader the opportunity to stay on your site longer and refresh something you might have written a moon or two ago. A good rule is to always link to at least one previous blog post—just don’t get crazy with the links.

In other words, if you have the content, consider referring / linking to it yourself, thereby increasing its lifetime value. And also make it easy for visitors to link to it, using social media plugins.