Thanks to everyone who attended our webinar on measuring the right marketing data. If you missed it, you can catch the replay here.
Someone asked recently, after seeing one of our talks, why social media as we know it will be destroyed, and why by the end of 2020. The answer? This coming election cycle will elevate information warfare and cyberwarfare to unprecedented levels. What will likely happen is simple and be one of three scenarios:
- Social media becomes unusable except for our closest circles, because disinformation will be rampant across every public channel. This is Mark Zuckerberg’s bet, and why Facebook is racing to shore up its direct messaging infrastructure, showing off a new Facebook interface yesterday at F8 with private networking at its heart. Public social media conversation will wither under the onslaught of fake everything.
- Social media becomes highly-regulated as governments realize it must be regulated and supervised. Industry self-supervision is a joke at best, and containing hostile foreign and domestic actors will be a legitimate national security issue in the EU and possibly in the US (depending on how willing people are to exit their partisan bubbles and see what’s really going on). Bet on the EU imposing draconian regulations; equally bet the US won’t take those steps.
- Social media becomes such a wasteland due to lack of regulation and rampant information warfare that users abandon it altogether. This is the least likely scenario – people still need a place to connect and some will gladly still suffer the swamp if it means having partisan viewpoints affirmed and reinforced.
Let’s put the political part aside and look at this situation through a marketing lens. No matter what scenario plays out, social media will be less useful to marketers in the coming months and years. Led by Facebook, social networks have built the walls around their gardens ever higher, forcing marketers to pay more and receive less. With privacy issues, data breaches, and massive interface changes as well as user habits changing, marketers who are over-reliant on social media had better diversify their portfolios. Social media will become significantly less measurable, too – the privacy changes and private conversations mean tracking our content will be extremely difficult.
What’s your plan? For Trust Insights, we’re doubling down on SEO – search overtook social as the primary driver of traffic to company websites a couple of years ago. We’re doubling down on email marketing. We’re doubling down on building private communities (getting ahead of the trend in scenario 1 above) like our Analytics for Marketers Slack group (join for free!). And we’re giving a hard look at our own events; in short, we’re focused on building relationships with you that are more direct and less managed by algorithms. On the analytics front, everyone needs to get really good at building memorable tracking and properties – in an age of untrackable private conversation, you’ll need better analytics than ever.
While we can’t say this strategy is right for every business in every situation, being closer to your customers has historically never been a bad thing. What’s your plan for a future with less effective, less measurable social media?
In this week’s Bright Idea, we bring you the replay of our webinar! Thanks to all who made it, and all who had such really terrific questions in the Q and A. If you’ve got questions after watching the webinar, just hit reply to this email and ask – we read every reply.
- {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: IBM Data Science and AI Roadshow Recap
- Marketing Analytics, Data Science and Leadership: April 29, 2019 Week In Review
- Using what you know to manage the machines via part 1
- In the Headlights, April 24, 2019 Issue
- {PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Brand Strategy and Brand Measurement
- Google Analytics Most Valuable Page Reporting
- Future of Machine Learning and AI via General Assembly Panel
- Predicting Traffic for B2B Content: A Trust Insights/BuzzSumo Study
- 2019 Key Marketing Trends Forecast
Social Media Marketing
- 4 Ways to Use Google Tag Manager With Facebook
- We All Work for Facebook
- How to Use the Facebook Event Setup Tool
Media Landscape
- Farewell to Payless and its terrible, no good, very cheap, occasionally meaningful shoes
- Save the Date: Moms and Media Research Results from Edison Research 2019
- How Do You Counter Fake News and Repair Your Company’s Reputation?
Tools, Machine Learning, and AI
- Confronting AI risks
- You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Toolbox Must-Haves
- Working Towards an Advanced, Inclusive, and Socially Responsible AI Framework
Analytics, Stats, and Data Science
- Scientific method: Statistical errors
- I Have a Lot of Data, I Just Dont Know Where! Towards Data Science
- How I Built Animated Plots in R to Analyze my Fitness Data
SEO, Google, and Paid Media
- 10 Ways to Get Google to Index Your Site (That Actually Work)
- Google may decide to charge for Google My Business listings
- Here’s what you need to know about image optimization for SEO
Business and Leadership
- AirPods Are a Survival Tool for Open-Plan Offices
- People analytics: A power tool for business challenges
- The demise and rebirth of the ethical engineer TechCrunch
Join the Club
Are you a member of our free, private Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 200 like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today.
Upcoming Events
Where can you find us in person?
- InfoShare, May 2019, Gdansk, Poland
- NEDMA, May 2019, Boston
- MAICON, July 2019, Cleveland
- Content Marketing World, September 2019, Cleveland
- INBOUND, September 2019, Boston
- MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2019, Washington DC
Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!
FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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