Distributed Denial of Tweets

Today In Digital Marketingis a daily podcast and daily newsletter showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:

• New Google Ranking Factor Unlocked: Experience
• Social Commerce Comes to CTV
• Women Podcast Listeners a Lucrative Audience
• Twitter Spaces Shut Down After Musk Tantrum
• Agency Compensation: Fixed Fees Vs. Time
• It Wasn’t So Super After All
• Reddit Adds Reverse-Chron Sort to App

Below is the transcription from this week’s topics

New Google Ranking Factor Unlocked: Experience

Google: Give me an E-A-T

Also Google: Now give me another E!

Google has updated its search quality guidelines by adding an extra E to E-A-T. EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and are the metrics by which Google evaluates content. Now, they're adding Experience to that.

E Is for Experience

The company said experience adds another level of quality to assess its search results. So what will Google be looking for when ranking content based on Double-E-A-T?

Now, it will be looking for content that demonstrates that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as:

• Actual use of a product
• Having actually visited a place
• Communicating with an experienced person

Quoting Google:

There are some situations where really what you value most is content produced by someone who has first-hand, life experience on the topic at hand.
For example, if you're looking for information on how to correctly fill out your tax returns, that's probably a situation where you want to see content produced by an expert in the field of accounting. But if you're looking for reviews of a tax preparation software, you might be looking for a different kind of information—maybe it's a forum discussion from people who have experience with different services.

This Circle of Trust

The company added that experience, expertise, and authoritativeness are all key concepts that can support your assessment of trust, with trust being the most significant, "because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem".

Image: Google

SOCIAL COMMERCE COMES TO CTV

The growing list of social commerce apps continues — A former executive for Prime Video launched a video shopping app yesterday in the beauty e-commerce space called Trendio, which will use AI to deliver targeted content across mobile and CTV.

The app features a TikTok-like feed where consumers can swipe through short previews of different products. The platform also lets users interact with creators through their live and pre-recorded videos, pin their favourite products to dashboards, and buy items from brands within the app.

The former exec told TechCrunch that one of the insights that he took from Amazon Prime Video was that consumers are shifting toward connected TV. For that reason, Trendio is currently available in the U.S. on iOS, Android and Roku.

Images: Trendio

WOMEN PODCAST LISTENERS A LUCRATIVE AUDIENCE

The number of women listening to podcasts is growing — and so are the brand opportunities.

Women account for half of the monthly podcast listeners in the U.S., according to a new report commissioned by audio platform SXM Media.

On top of that, more than a third of women over the age of 18 said they had listened to a podcast in the past month. This is estimated to be 47 million women.

Brand Opportunities

The study also found women listeners were more likely to consider, recommend, purchase, and spend more on brands they hear advertised on podcasts with hosts or producers who are women compared to other podcasts.

Besides podcasts reaching a growing audience of women, the audience is also highly coveted:

• Monthly listeners tend to skew younger
• The listeners were also more educated
• More likely to be in the workforce
• More likely to have a higher household income

Despite the fact that those demos are prime for many advertisers, podcasts aren't "necessarily thought of as top of mind," for brands targeting women, according to SXM Media's VP of sales research.

As for what podcasts they are tuning into, the report found that women listen to a wide variety of podcasts. However, their preferences differ based more on specific demographics like race and ethnicity.

(Data has been provided by SXM Media’s survey of over 1,500 U.S. adults who identify as women).

Images: Media SXM

TWITTER SPACES SHUT DOWN AFTER MUSK TANTRUM

Elon Musk shut down Twitter's live audio service Spaces last night, forcing many brands to cancel their scheduled events. And it's kind of a crazy story as to why.

The drama starts with that college kid who set up a Twitter account that reposted the publicly available flight data of Elon Musk's jet. Before Musk owned the platform, he offered the kid $5000 to take it down, and the kid said no.

When Musk bought Twitter he said he was so committed to free speech that he wouldn't even take the account down.

That commitment lasted about a month, as this week Musk permanently banned that account, saying the account was giving out his location without his permission (something it wasn't doing, and was a somewhat rich claim, considering reports that Twitter plans to require users to disclose their precise location in order to continue using the app, but whatever).

That's when things got messy.

First, They Came for the Journalists

The about-face was covered by journalists, reporting that Musk had banned the jet account.

Then, last night, the accounts of many of those journalists were also permanently banned — journalists from major news organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC.

Last night, some reporters set up a Twitter Space to chat about the day's events, where they discovered that those journalists who were permanently banned that day were still able to join and participate in the Space.

Then, Elon Musk himself shows up in the Space, claims that the reporters were banned because they doxxed him — which, by any standard, wasn't true — then, when one of those reporters asked him a question about the bans, Musk hung up.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

About 15 minutes later, the Twitter Space mysteriously and abruptly stopped. Even though it was being recorded, the recording wasn't there.

People started realizing that not only was that Space down, but the entire Twitter Spaces platform was gone — you couldn't join any, you couldn't start any, you couldn't listen to any past Spaces, and by this morning even the icon in the app that sends you to that section has disappeared.

Musk himself confirmed that he had pulled the plug on the entire platform, citing what he called a "legacy bug."

But he didn't say what the bug was, or why they chose to fix it by taking it entirely offline, or why they didn't fix it earlier. It's speculated that Musk didn't like that banned accounts can still participate in Spaces, but who knows.

Unleash the Crazy!

That's when Musk appeared to go off the rails.

First, the reporter who started that Space he got so pissy about works for Buzzfeed. She reported last night that Twitter's email servers now block any emails from their domain from getting into the company.

Then, Musk puts up a poll asking people when he should unsuspend the accounts he banned. When the poll starts showing most people voting for an immediate reversal, Musk cancels it, saying there are too many poll options. He redoes it, and an even higher percentage vote for the accounts to be unbanned.

So far, not only are those accounts still banned, this morning even more journalists were getting removed from the platform. One of them was a reporter who published an investigation of Tesla, and documented the times Musk had his enemies tracked.

All Your Links Are Belong to Musk

Many of these reporters migrated to Mastodon last night — so... guess what happened?

First, Mastodon's Twitter account was permanently banned. Then, users discovered they couldn't post links to their Mastodon accounts at all. Or add their Mastodon account handles to their Twitter bios.

Twitter is even blocking links to Pixelfed servers, which are just Instagram clones, but use the same independent server setup as Mastodon.

You might be asking "Sure, but how's Twitter Blue going?" A new analysis has found that 15 of the top 20 Twitter Blue subscribers, as measured by follower count, are porn accounts.

Despite all this going down — something that is probably the biggest social media scandal in months — Twitter's trending section, at the time I wrote this, showed a video game, the TV show Criminal Minds, and a hashtag about Donald Trump's run for the presidency.

Late this morning, Bloomberg reported that Spaces was back up — except not for anyone who attended that train-wreck of a Space last night. If you were listening in on that Space, as I was, you're still banned from Spaces, as I apparently am.

In the end, Elon might be right after all. Last night, he tweeted:

Indeed.

AGENCY COMPENSATION: FIXED FEES VS. TIME

Stop paying marketers for their time. While labour-based fees remain the most common form of ad agency compensation, more marketers are increasingly using fixed, or output-based fees, according to a new study by the Association of National Advertisers.

With a fixed, output-based fee, advertisers determine a price “for a specific project or set of deliverables,” compared to calculating payment based on how much time an agency spends working on a project.

Fixed Fees > Time

The study found that the majority of marketers that spend “$500 million or more per year now employ fixed or output-based fees,” up nearly 50% from 2016.

The report suggests a couple of reasons for the shift. According to the report:

One likely reason for a switch from labor-based to fixed or output-based fees relates to greater administrative efficiency. Because the fees are based on outputs, there is no review or haggling over agency labor time. A second reason is more philosophic and may relate to marketers who want to compensate the agency for what they produce, not the time it takes to produce it.

IT WASN’T SO SUPER AFTER ALL

Another one of Meta's experiments is dust in the wind. Yesterday, the company announced that Super, its Cameo-inspired app, will be no more as of February 15, 2023.

While it won't pull the plug on the app until February, users won’t be able to create a new event during the shutdown period. If users have an upcoming scheduled event during this window, the company recommends that the event be rescheduled on another platform.

The company added users who participated in a Super event or hosted one can download their recorded media before it heads to the Meta graveyard.

Image: Super

REDDIT ADDS REVERSE-CHRON SORT TO APP

Image: Reddit

Finally, Reddit announced a couple of changes to its app yesterday:

1. First, a new "Latest" feed was added to the drop-down menu, which lets users view content sorted in reverse chronological order.
2. The platform is also removing Home feed sort controls and defaulting Home to the “Best” sort.

The company said its research indicated that 99% of Redditors use two sorts on their Home Feed: “Best” and “New.”

Feed updates are currently rolling out to iOS users, and will be rolled out to Android users in the New Year.

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com