JB’s Digital Update 5th December 2023

This week’s early Christmas crackers include: 🎄

✅ Gmail, crushing the hopes and dreams of email marketers; 

✅ Omniscient Google becoming omnipresent; 

✅Google search adding Organisation structured data as a source of information; 

✅ Twitter, yet again, haemorrhaging advertisers and revenue;

✅ And Facebook’s Meta Quest 3 makes a bit of a damp squib into the market, just in time for Christmas. 

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

❤️ Don’t forget to like, share, follow, subscribe, wherever you see this post ❤️

So, Google is about to start a mass purge of Gmail accounts. These are inactive accounts which have been on used for a long time and it’s about to cause headaches for email marketers.

One of the problems is that a lot of email marketers have relied traditionally on the size of their lists to prove their worth. Unfortunately that also means that when their lists get filled with inactive subscribers, they actually have very few real genuine email contacts. So all of a sudden you can expect a large wail from email marketers as their numbers drop substantially.

There are large arguments in email marketing for clearing up your lists regularly and cleaning out non-engaging subscribers. This is one of the reasons why you do that.

If you’d like to talk to me about email and CRM, then please get in touch. Happy to help. 

As we move into the next stage of Web3, possibly Web4 we find that Google is trying to become the omniscient, omnipresent social network as well as a search network. It’s almost comparable to the Chinese WeChat network, which is the all singing all dancing app where you can do everything. Google is not quite there yet, but with Search, Discover, News, Bard, Assistant, Lens, Images, Shopping, Maps, and the rest of them not forgetting YouTube, it is certainly looking like it is getting that way.

The other thing that Google is doing is introducing social like functions to search with the addition of a follow button which we covered last week. Of course Google has a long history of ditching products, even products which seem to be successful. Many of these new elements of Google revolve around an extension of its search capabilities rather than trying to reinvent the wheel in other areas. Perhaps that’s where it is safest – application and extension of existing capabilities.

If you want to know more about creating and applying a sensible digital marketing strategy for Google and other networks as we move into these interesting times, please get in touch.

Remember how I said Google Search was changing? Well, I did, so there. Google has now added organisation mark up to search. Finally, it seems giving up on its long-held ambition to ignore structured data in any meaningful way and discover the structure data from its web crawling capabilities.

This is great news because it will allow you to make sure that the information that Google takes from your website and applies to your knowledge graph is exactly the right information that you want it to have. It also means that you can use the sameAs organisation structured markup to make sure that that information is tied in across the web, across social networks, other websites, other listings, and so on

I think it’s interesting that Google has given up, not because I don’t think they have the capabilities, but I think that just the variety of data sources, poor coding, and obfuscation of data means that Google really has no other option but use data it is fed from webmasters and websites.

Talk to me about SEO and structured data. Let’s chat.

In the latest episode of the extraordinary saga of Twitter, many, many advertisers appear to not only have cancelled their advertising, but also have walked away from posting on the social platform. They don’t appear to have deleted their accounts quite yet, but they certainly seem to have pulled back from posting. This has only exacerbated the steep drop in revenue that Twitter was already facing, supposedly up to around $75 million in ad revenue.

Of course Elon Musk and his CEO, Linda Yaccarino, have made bullish statements about the rude health of Twitter, the rude health of its FreeSpeech platform, but perhaps not such rude health of its accounting books.

Although people are forecasting its demise, its downloads to new phones are holding steady. This may will be because of existing contracts to install Twitter as an app on new or rebooted phones, or it may just include app updates from the installed user base. Either way it’s not growing and that’s not good for Twitter.

I’m happy to chat about social media and content strategies and paid social strategies. Just reach out and give me a call!

Remember the Metaverse? That thing that Mark Zuckerberg invested however many billions of dollars into, but which he canned earlier on this year to pursue AI? Yes that one

As a perhaps apologetic release, the Meta Quest 3 has now been released into the market, just in time for holiday shopping. Yes, you too can wear oversized ski goggles while waving your arms around and generally looking like a bit of an idiot. There is a reason these things haven’t really taken to mass adoption yet. I wonder what it could be

It’s a bit telling that the launch was after the Cyber Week / Black Friday sales. Perhaps that was so that they didn’t need to discount the price. The fact that it was launched on November 30 indicates they wanted to sell at full price for Christmas.

If you want to talk about the Metaverse, virtual reality, digital transformation, digital technology and infrastructure, please give me a call.

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

• Boost Conversions and Sales with Belmore Digital’s CRO Services
• Google Ads Faceoff: Search Ads vs. Performance Max – Choosing the Right Strategy for Your Business
• Social Media Mastery: A Comprehensive Guide for Business Owners

Thanks, JB :-)