Kurt Vonnegut predicted that we would have to invent our own tribes because we’ve lost that tribal cohesion in industrialized culture.
Some brands step into the tribal vacuum for their fans (CrossFit, modern Politics, wellness factions, etc.).
The first step is having the courage to not message to everyone. Tribes (for better or worse) are built in part on “us vs. them” positioning.
That’s the thing about audiences, they never fit neatly into one box or another. In different contexts, in different situations, they want different things and have different priorities.
Chatbots are hot like Hansel (again)
ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, is working on an open platform that will allow users to create their own chatbots, as the company races to catch up in generative artificial intelligence (AI) amid fierce competition that kicked off with last year’s launch of ChatGPT.
The “bot development platform” will be launched as a public beta by the end of the month
This is one of the biggest things I’ve taken away from recent Google search algo updates: topical relevance.
Write about topics related to your brand, don’t chase trends and clickbait.
Google is stupid. It’s not smart. It’s math. It’s counting things.
So it it’s counting more little leagues than it’s counting electrical distribution equipment, there you go: topical confusion.
Eric Schwartzman on the Myth of Organic SEO and what he learned delving into the realms of black hat and negative SEO:
Google is doing updates daily to its [search] algorithm. We’re just hearing about the ones that have PR value.
The reason that they want to keep us in line [with their ideal SEO best practices] is because they want it to be less expensive to have to process what’s going on on the internet to decide what to index and what to serve.
This is about more than [just] SEO.
Update on the update on the missing UTM data in GA4:
I still see lower level parameters populating for yesterday and the day before. (Storing the data beyond yesterday appeared to be part of the issue previously.)
Hopefully all is back to normal and we can get back to nerding out.
Ready advertiser one?
(Or maybe .5 since it’s not VR?)
Blippar’s AR units leverage both front and rear-facing cameras, launching immersive AR content within the ad creative itself without diverting users from the webpage.
The thin gray line
Google’s big drop is a horizontal line.
Ads may be easier to distinguish from organic results again with the return of a dividing line between the two on search results pages.
And everything old is new again?
Looks like Google realized Signals-based thresholding was annoying to everyone:
Google signals will be removed from the reporting identity on February 12, 2024. This change will apply to all of your Google Analytics 4 properties and will only affect reporting features. Google Analytics will still collect Google signals, when enabled, to be used in demographics and interests reporting. Google signals will also still support audience and conversion use cases, like remarketing and conversion optimization in linked Google advertising products.