The Machine Learning Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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

• Meta's New Recurring Emails
• AI Says: That Was An Ad!
• Toxic Links: Don't Sweat Them
• Snapchat Collabs with eBay
• Customer Service Chatbots
• Meta Slowing Down?
• YouTube Shorts Get Analytics
• "Outhorse" Your Email

Below is the transcription from this weeks topics

Meta is making it even easier for you to slide into your customers' DMs.

Yesterday, the company announced Recurring Notifications which is an update to the Messenger API that enables businesses to send proactive, automated messages to customers who have opted in to receive them.

With the feature, brands deliver customized messaging at a specific time to their consumers, such as:

• Product recommendations
• Newsletters
• Sales & promotions
• Discount codes and more

This is a new, optional premium feature that the company intends to charge businesses for in the future. It is currently available for all businesses using Messenger Platform as part of a free trial period.

Meta also noted that the feature for businesses will be headed to Instagram in the fall, and developers can now sign up for its beta interest list.

AI Says: That Was An Ad!

One advantage of influencer marketing is that it may not always seem like an advertisement. Well, the UK's Advertising Standards Authority intends to put some ropes around that marketing strategy.

The ASA has announced a project that uses artificial intelligence to identify Instagram Stories posted by influencers that do not clearly disclose their content is an ad.

To identify potential ads in posts, machine learning algorithms are used alongside image recognition and natural language processing techniques are used to categorize influencer posts. It also searches for possible ad labels to identify content that may be an ad but, despite rules, is not clearly labelled.

As a result, the ASA monitors dozens of "high-risk" influencers each week, and so far more than 80,000 Instagram Stories have been analyzed for non-compliance since the project began, with around 20,000 captured every month.

The company is working to enhance this process, by tracking what influencers are talking about and analyzing trends in tagging and mentions, and your brand could pay the price.

Quoting the ASA:

We are also ramping up our monitoring of companies who partner with influencers and holding them to account. Repeat offenders who are unable or unwilling to follow the rules will face an escalation of sanctions and enforcement action.

Toxic Links: Don't Sweat Them

Are toxic links really that bad for your web site's ranking?

According to Google Search Console, you should try to disavow low-quality or spammy backlinks.

But Google Search advocate John Mueller recently addressed a Reddit concern that suggests there’s no need to be concerned.

In response to a question about where the links come from, he said, ""Toxic links" is all about selling tools. Don't get hung up about it."

As reported by Search Engine Roundtable, Google has previously indicated it has no internal concept of toxic domains and that you can ignore toxic links and the tools that report on them.

But, will you?

Snapchat Collabs with eBay

More shopping Snaps are headed to Snapchat – the platform is expanding its e-commerce offerings with a new eBay integration.

The platform announced yesterday that users can now share listings directly from eBay using the Snapchat camera on Android and iOS.

Through the integration, Snapchatters can share items on eBay that they are interested in, or selling, with their contacts. While eBay merchants can share their listings across platforms with their community.

Consumers and sellers can share an item to their Snaps and Snapchat stories when viewing an item in the eBay app, with the listing appearing as a sticker that they can overlay on their post. By tapping the sticker, users will be directed to the eBay listing.

Customer Service Chatbots

We consumers are fickle. We expect the products to be perfect, and customer service to be fast and precise. Problem is, people are sometimes neither of those last two. So little surprise that many brands have turned to chatbots to supplement, or — in some cases — to completely replace their human customer service team.

• Take AFLAC‚ which famously has a duck as a mascot. A couple of years ago, it introduced DuckChat, an AI bot on Facebook messenger that would help enroll customers.
• Or Bank of America, that made a chatbot named Erica, and set her to work in its mobile app, helping customers with basic banking tasks.
• There's Levi's Virtual Stylist, a bot inside Facebook Messenger
• There's even LubeChat — which, no, not what you're thinking — this was actually a B2B chatbot from Shell, which helped share product information for customers of its industrial lubricants.

And while a lot of research has gone into how consumers react to chatbot conversations, there hasn't been a lot of study into how the bots make people feel about the company itself... people like investors in the company.

That's what Darima Fotheringham set out to discover. She is co-author of a research study called "The effect of implementing chatbot customer service on stock returns" which was published recently in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

She spoke with me earlier, told me that while chatbots are generally seen positively by investors, if you’re a B2B brand, there is one thing in particular you should avoid — making your bot too humanlike.

DR. FOTHERINGHAM: What we found was that using more anthropomorphic features — like giving a human name or personality, or… making it sound more like a human agent — did not really have a significant positive or negative effect overall. However, when it came to b2b companies … increasing human-like features in these chatbots was hurting these positive effects. So we saw that making these chatbots more anthropomorphized or more human-like for b2b companies, was really detracting from from effectiveness of these chatbots.

The full interview will be available on our Premium Podcast feed tomorrow.

Meta Slowing Down?

Meta confirmed today it is cutting back on investments in several products.

It's halted hiring for its shopping team, Messenger Kids, as well as for certain engineering roles, and low-level data scientists, The Verge reports.

According to a recording obtained of the meeting, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that there are no job cuts... yet.

Quoting Zuckerberg:

I can’t sit here and make a permanent ongoing promise that as things shift, we won’t have to reconsider that, but what I can tell you is that as of where we sit today, our expectation is not that we’re going to have to do that. And instead, basically what we’re doing is we’re dialing growth to the levels that we think are going to be manageable over time.

A Meta spokesperson has confirmed the freeze, and stated "As we alluded to in our recent earnings, we’re evaluating key priorities across the company and putting energy behind them, especially as they relate to our core business and Reality Labs.”

While Zuck added that he wants to be clear that the company is "in a very strong position" and that it has "a very healthy business, and we’re still growing quickly.”

In other words, "This is fine. I'm fine. Everything is fine!"

YouTube Shorts Get Analytics

YouTube is finally giving your brand data insights for Shorts. Yesterday, the platform announced it is launching separate analytics for videos in YouTube Studio.

With the update, the "Reach" and "Engagement" tabs will be replaced with a new "Content" tab to separate data for your different content types, including;

• Videos
• Shorts
• Live streams, and
• Posts

By tapping into any of these formats, you'll see specific information for each, so you can keep track of the performance of your different content types. Alternatively, you can still view your content performance in aggregate on the 'All' tab.

The platform added that all previously available metrics will remain available in the new format, although some may have been moved around. And if you'd like to see more advanced analytics, you can switch to "Advanced Mode".

Image: YouTube

YouTube said the update will be rolling out to all creators on desktop and mobile in the next few weeks.

"Outhorse" Your Email

Image: Visit Iceland

A tourism agency has created an ad targeted to get you to stop checking your work email while on vacation — and they aren't horsing around.

Visit Iceland conducted a study that found that 4 out of 10 people still check their work emails while taking time off. In response, their solution is a campaign for their new email service called "OutHorse Your Email," in which horses respond to out-of-office emails.

By trotting over a large keyboard mat, the horses are able to handle your out-of-office emails, and vacationers can feel confident their professional communications will not be ignored.

This may sound like a ridiculous idea, but I can assure you that it is very real.

I wonder if you can hire an Icelandic horse to do podcasts?

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