Ok, I have to start today with something that isn’t really a tech related thing (ok, it isn’t at all), but it is an Internet thing, so bear with me while I explain. You might have heard in the news that Target recently instituted “gender neutralized” labeling of all its children’s products. And, predictably, Americans went a bit nutty over the news. Target’s Facebook page exploded, and many of the comments were pretty offensive. Enter Mike Melgaard.
As AdWeek.com reported, in what might be the most epic “trolling for good” ever witnessed, “Melgaard came to Target’s defense—in a provocative manner. He created a fake Facebook account and posed as a Target customer service rep—under the name @AskForHelp, with a Target-like bull’s-eye profile pic—and began excoriating the haters with comically sarcastic replies. He got away with it for about 16 hours, too, commenting on about 50 posts before the fake account was shut down.”
If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth your time to read—I promise. Although while it’s definitely chuckle-inducing, it’s also frightening to see some of the hatred out there that’s personified in some of the comments.
And in case you were worried about Target being upset over Melgaard’s prank (which, um, took Target SIXTEEN HOURS to shut down!), I think its safe to say they’ve gotten a boat load of free press as a result of @AskForHelp.
Anyhow, let’s get back to the business at hand, and dive into “Things you Need to Know This Week.” Google reveals the ABCs of business, ad blockers are hot, hot, hot, and Twitter makes yet another change.
Google Creates New Umbrella Holding Company Called Alphabet
There’s a new Google entity in town – a holding company called “Alphabet.” After a major shakeup of the key Google players, and (sort of) admitting that G+ hasn’t quite lived up to expectations, Google’s Alphabet—a collection of Google owned companies, including Google itself—will replace Google Inc. as the publicly traded entity. If you’re a shareholder, not an issue, as all Google shares automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, and the two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.
According to Google’s Larry Page, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses. Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.”
Page added, “Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort. We are also stoked about growing our investment arms, Ventures and Capital, as part of this new structure.” The more you read about this restructuring, the more sense it makes for Google to split off its core business from the search and ad business and it will be interesting to see what develops from here.
Attention Marketers: Nearly 200 Million People Now Use Adblockers
via The Next Web TNW
Oh, marketers, are we really surprised? No. Adblocker tool usage is on the rise, and it’s really no shock considering that most of us loathe being interrupted by advertising.
A report from PageFair and Adobe indicates that almost 200 million people are currently using adblocking tools. What’s the hit on publishers’ pocketbooks? Nearly $22 billion in lost revenue this year and $41 billion next year—definitely no small amount.
Apple’s upcoming iOS 9 might allow third-party adblocking tools, and it’s expected that more and more people will use adblockers in the coming months.
Clearly, there’s an open door here for some crafty new startup to create the anti-adblocker. Or something.
Email Marketers Moving to Multi-Channel, Real-Time Communication
Email is definitely not dead but, there’s an urgent need for email marketers to remain relevant. According to marketer.com, “…2015 will be an important year for brands looking to shift toward a next-generation approach to real-time email marketing…”
In fact, among U.S. marketers polled by The Relevancy Group in December 2014, the ability to use real-time data as well as the ability to centralize customer databases (making them actionable) were among the top five email marketing priorities for 2015.
Spencer Kollas, vice president of global deliverability services at Experian Marketing Services, had this to say, “The need for relevancy has never been stronger; today’s consumers expect a seamless digital experience across the board. If consumers are going to engage with a brand, they expect that brand to know the best way to reach them and communicate with them. They don’t care that your email marketing group or provider isn’t going to get credit if you click on something via SMS instead of email. Your customers see you as one brand, and that’s as it should be. For a long time, email marketing was just the old-fashioned [email] blast.” Now, email is infinitely more sophisticated and marketing in general is driven by data and personalization and the goal is always engaging with people at the right time, in the right manner, with the right information or offer, and using the right channel.
Email marketers today are also looking to merge their online customer data with offline data, including consumers’ in-store purchasing behavior, which will help marketers see a more end-to-end picture of customers and more clearly define their relationship with a brand and/or company.
Email is certainly not dead. But it is exponentially more complex than ever before. And, when used properly, able to deliver great returns on your marketing spend.
Internet of Things
Retailers Continue to Experiment With Beacons to Gather Valuable Real Time Customer Data
via eMarketer
Are beacons the holy grail of next-generation marketing or just another hyped up bright, shiny object? That’s what marketers are starting to ask themselves, what with consumer indifference to the technology, and retailers still dragging their heels in the experimental phase, almost two years after Apple’s introduced its highly touted iBeacon.
According to a new eMarketer report, marketers continue to promote beacons for their personalization capabilities even though most consumers are yet to be interested and most retailers are still just experimenting.
“With smartphones and wearables, we’re turning the physical world into a real-time digital world, and we’re going to be able to track the physical world just like we’re able to track the digital world, with beacons as a proxy to help understand what consumers are doing, where they’re going and what type of messages are creating action just like we do online,” said Jeff Malmad, managing director and head of mobile and Life+ at Mindshare North America.
Hmmm. That all sounds good, in principal, but it appears the reality of current beacon data usage is much different. According to emarketer.com, “For marketers, the holy grail is pinpointing shoppers’ in-store location and using data such as past shopping behavior to offer highly personalized deals on the spot. But this idea remains mostly theoretical.
In practice, beacons are more likely to push a welcome message or general discount unrelated to a shopper’s location or preferences. And rather than being seamless, many implementations require active participation from consumers.”
So, where does that leave us? Well, a recent study by Econsultancy and Signal looked at the usage of first-party data among marketers in North America, and found that “strong ROI” companies actively collected data from beacons, compared with just 8 percent of all others. I write about big data a lot. This is yet another instance that shows if you get the data that’s neat. But the key to success is to properly analyze and then USE the data in a way that delivers the most value. The companies who get that will win.
Apps
Popular Password Manager LastPass Now Free on Mobile Devices
via TNW
In case you’re still doubting that we are rapidly becoming a mobile first world, here’s another example of yet another company that’s taking mobile very seriously.
LastPass, the creator of the world’s most irritating (yet very hard to hack) passwords, now offers a free tier for managing your passwords on mobile devices. The new option allows you to sync passwords for free, as long as you use the same type of device (smartphones to other smartphones, for instance). Previously, the desktop version was free, but using it on mobile was bundled into the $12 subscription cost. If you want to sync between desktop to smartphone, it will still cost you $12 annually. That seems like a pretty good deal.
Back to my point about mobile: LastPass hasn’t made significant changes to its business model in over seven years. Why change now? Because mobile. Especially used for business.
With security in the wake of headlines filled with news of new data breaches on a regular basis, everyone should be using strong, random passwords for all online accounts. This new offering from LastPass is a great way to keep track of all those passwords safely and securely.
Digital Audio and Video
Visual Content Seen Most Important in Telling Marketing Stories, But Chaos Abounds
In a 2015 survey by the CMO Council, conducted in partnership with Libris, almost 67 percent of senior marketers in North America said that visual assets were central to communicating their brand story, and the majority believed the importance would only grow.
BUT, it seems very few marketers are actively working in-house to either create, or, more importantly, aggregate, catalog, and manage all visuals.
The CMO Council/Lubis polled senior marketers across North America, who reported that “…thirty-five percent of respondents had no process in place to keep visual assets in check. While more than half had some sort of system in place to aggregate, catalog, and manage all visuals, the majority in this group only had it within specific departments, at 29 percent, vs. 27 percent who had a process across the company as a whole.” (as reported on emarketer.com
It’s obvious that while there are clearly good intentions with regard to the creation of visual content, if you’ve got no way of organizing, sorting, cataloging, and/or making it accessible across the enterprise, as well as educating your teams about how they might be able to use it, well, it’s probably not going to deliver much value.
Social Media
Buffer Adds Ability To Post and Schedule Native Video on Facebook and Twitter
via Marketing Land
Buffer, the popular social media scheduling app, has added the ability to upload, post, and schedule native video to Facebook and Twitter to all user accounts including those on their free plan.
Users can now schedule and upload mp4, mov or avi video files up to one gigabyte in size on Buffer to post to Twitter, Facebook and Google+ as native video posts. For LinkedIn and Pinterest, which don’t have native video, Buffer video posts will display with links to Buffer’s video server. More smart moves from the team at Buffer.
Facebook Defends Three Second Video Views
On Medium this week, Matt Pakes, a manager in Facebook’s video product team, defended the notion that three seconds is enough of a signal for Facebook to register that someone has watched video in the News Feed.
According to Pakes, “While there is no broad industry standard for view measurement, three seconds is one common choice, and gives us a consistent metric for all video on Facebook. If you have stayed on a video for at least three seconds, it signals to us that you are not simply scrolling through feed and you’ve shown intent to watch that video.”
Why was Pakes speaking out? Because prominent YouTube creator Hank Green had lashed out at the social giant in an earlier Medium post, harshly criticizing its three-minute video view standard, and tearing into the company for favoring Facebook native video over YouTube. He also railed against Facebook’s alleged habit of ‘looking away’ when users use (and promote as theirs) videos that don’t belong to them.
According to marketingland.com, “Green cited a study by Ogilvy and Tubular Labs that found that 725 of the 1,000 most popular Facebook videos of Q1 2015 were “stolen re-uploads” and that these so-called “freebooted” videos drew more than 17 billion views on Facebook.”
Pakes’ fired back saying, “As video continues to grow rapidly on Facebook…we’re actively exploring further solutions to help IP owners identify and manage potential infringing content, tailored for our unique platform and ecosystem. This is a significant technical challenge at our scale, but we have a team working on it and expect to have more to share later this summer.”
Length of Twitter Direct Messages Now Unlimited
As of this week, Twitter has officially removed the character limit from direct messages.
This means you can now send messages that are as long as you want via direct messages. The change is rolling out now and all users should see it within a few weeks.
Even though direct messages are now unlimited, Twitter made it clear that the character limit won’t be going away for public tweets anytime soon.
I’m not sure how I feel about this one. Part of what makes Twitter Twitter is its character limitation, and its direct messages are already a cesspool of spammy “Hey, read my blog!” or “Hey, team followback!!” type messages. I can’t imagine how bad it will be when people you’re not connect with can send you messages of infinite length. I can’t even find it in myself to like it as a marketer.
Periscope
Video Streaming App Periscope Up to 10 Million Registered Users
via Recode
Speaking of Twitter, TheNextWeb.com is reporting {With a cheeky headline: “Periscope Has 10 Million Users (Kinda)} that more than 10 million people have now created Periscope accounts since the product launched at the end of March. Of those 10 million, almost two million people use the app daily.
The important thong to remember is 10 million signups does not 10 million active users make. But, for the love of vanity metrics, Periscope is sticking to total accounts created and how much time people are spending watching streams every day.
“Success for broadcasters means more time watched on their broadcasts,” CEO Kayvon Beykpour explained in a blog post. “Success for the audience means more high-quality broadcasts in their feeds that they want to watch and participate in.”
Miscellaneous
