JB’s Digital Update 21st November 2023

Disruptors have been properly disrupted in this week’s digital update 📣

✅ Open AI sacks (and maybe rehires) CEO Sam Altman;

✅ Muksy’s comments start The Great Twitter Xodus 2023; 

✅ Let’s talk conversions and behavioural strategies – everyone’s doing it; 

✅ Meta & Amazon buddy up to sell directly in-app from the ad;

✅ Google gets really personal in a search hybrid “feed”.

🌟All that wrapped up in a handy video and blog post by me, your genial, disruptive, JB ;-) Read on and enjoy! 🌟

(And don’t forget to like, share, follow, subscribe wherever you see this post. It’s appreciated.)

Late last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was unceremoniously fired from his role by the board of OpenAI. The Chairman and a number of others followed shortly thereafter, with more apparently considering their positions. This took the tech world by surprise, as well as a significant number of large investors in OpenAI, if reports are to be believed. 

This follow the recent release by OpenAI upgrading ChatGPT and allowing users to effectively create their own ChatGPT models / engines and bypass the “AI” hangers-on who were arbitraging API access for a monetisable product.

The stories I’ve read have said that the Board felt the CEO was not being entirely upfront with them – but about who knows what? The other side was that he wanted to aggressively monetise the platform, which may not have gelled with its slightly complicated Not-For-Profit parent company / Capped-Profit subsidiary company structure. The other stories have their major investor Microsoft being off-the-wall livid they didn’t know about this beforehand, regardless of whether they agree with it – Bing / Co-Pilot & ChatGPT are getting more and more intertwined. They apparently want Sam & others back, and machinations are happening to achieve this. 

Upset and upheaval are almost never good for a product, or a company, and it’s not yet known if this will turn out to deliver unintended disruption. It may destroy the startup, or it may make it a prize takeover (likely Microsoft, you’d have to think). By the time this gets published, who knows what may have happened. At least the actions are prompt. 

Let’s talk AI, Digital, tech with me as your Virtual Chief Digital Officer. I can help you navigate digital transformation successfully.

Following a very controversial Xitter post by Elon Musk where he appeared to agree with a post containing anti-semitic sentiment, the backlash has been quick and pretty severe. A whole load of big advertisers, like Apple, Disney and others have publicly distanced themselves from the platform cancelling their advertising in the process. This hurts Xitter right in the wallet when there were already reports that advertising revenue had tanked. 

The second side of this was that users also appeared to leave the platform in significant numbers. Across on Meta’s text-based rival Threads, there have been countless threads from users announcing they’ve left “the other place” for good and even deleted the app / their info. 

These moments are significant. I’ve been there when networks implode and user bases shift across to other platforms. This feels like those times. So much so, I tagged it The Great Xodus. It might still take 12-18 months to full pan out, but for the moment Xitter is Dead Man Walking. 

Let’s talk about Social Media Management, where you should put your digital ad budgets, and how you should form a coherent content strategy in this changing market.

Rather than corporate upheaval, let’s talk about conversions based on some behavioural pointers from this handy article. These 5 pointers are really the basics of what you should be trying to do on each page as they speak to some very deep human instincts. My preference for these kinds of things are the 6 Principles of Persuasion by Bob Cialdini, but these are close enough. 

Social proof – we do things others like to do, eg number of likes, number of sales; Cognitive load – putting too much mental strain on the user to complete the transaction; Scarcity – “only 1500 left!”; Loss Aversion – imagine if you were in a car accident; Anchoring – X is cheaper than Y. 

All useful techniques to remember. One of the things I always find people do not do enough of is asking for the sale / action, and telling people explicitly what they should do. So, if you want to talk to me about Conversions and Conversion Rate Optimisation, use the button beneath to contact me. 

This new ecommerce integration from Meta and Amazon is a bit of game changer for Amazon sellers in the US, and may eventually be rolled out in Australia. 

Basically, if you are advertising your Amazon wares on Facebook / Instagram, rather than an interested user having to leave the app and wade through the Amazon app to purchase, the user can click and complete the transaction right in the Facebook or Instagram app. Like we talk about elsewhere in conversions, shortening the click journey reduces the cognitive load and almost always produces increased sales. 

Consumer information will be pumped from Amazon to Meta, allowing better targeted ads for those consumers, also allowing for personalisation on the way through, and in return getting many more sales from a discovery platform that was previously a little tricky for them to convert directly off. For Meta, they can sell more, better performing ad inventory and the user doesn’t leave the app to transact. If they’re still in the app, they can see more ads…. And last but not least, Amazon Sellers will sell more inventory. Win, win, win.

Fiendish and brilliant in one fell swoop. Expect more of these kinds of integrations and personalisation in the future. If you’d like to advertise ecommerce products on social media, then talk to me. I don’t bite. Too hard.

Now this is interesting. Google is allowing you to “follow” topics *in search* for updates to that topic to appear when you re-do the search, or in your Google App feed. You may also get a “News For You” section in search. Interesting. 

Google by now must have recognised that more people are spending more time in other apps and while searches are increasing as we spend more time online, the percentage of time spent on Google vs other apps is decreasing. In that case, ad revenue is challenged because fewer eyeballs equals fewer impressions and clicks and so on. The other challenge is that users are also doing their search in those apps, like we talked about Gen Z and TikTok search a few weeks back. 

By allowing you to save topics of interest, you can come back and save yourself time if its a regular search, or keep up with updates if the topic is continually updating – I’m not sure how it works with newsy topics at the moment. So, with enough topics, you create a self-curated topic feed which you can use and read to your heart’s content. Build up enough good quality topics and you can almost live in search. As a site owner, you might be able to suggest the topic to follow, eg “Follow XYZ Brand on Google Search”. 

Let’s not pretend it’s a Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok killer app, but it may go some way to prevent user’s search frequency, or time on site from  being decimated by those apps. It has the capacity to be handy, but it’s not likely to be a world-beater. That said, I miss iGoogle. 

Want to talk about Google Search in all its flavours and technicalities? Talk to me. 

You may have missed these articles and be champing at the bit to read them:

• Supercharge Your Reach with Belmore Digital’s PPC and Paid Social Services
• Elevate Your Social Media Presence with Belmore Digital’s SMM Services
• Unlock Your Business Potential with Belmore Digital’s Content Strategy and Creation Services

Thanks for reading / watching, JB :-)

(Don’t forget to like, share, follow, subscribe wherever you see this post).