This week on the Digital Coffee,
Australia want to charge
Facebook and Google to
post links to news sites there.
Youtube have introduced a tool that blurs
out faces and car registration numbers
and LinkedIn, LinkedIn,
are updating company pages.
All that and more after this.
Good morning. Good morning. Good morning
and welcome to the Digital Coffee.
This is your weekly dose of
digital marketing and social media
news for small business.
My name is Amanda Webb.
If you want to shoot videos
outside in the wild and there's
people around and there's cars
around, we have a problem.
We have a problem because without getting
the permission from the people that we
see in a video, technically we're
not supposed to use that video.
Also car registration numbers
are unique identifiers.
So there's GDPR issues there.
If we feature a number plate,
we supposed to blur
that out, but that's Oh,
you may as well just not shoot outside.
Right? That is a lot of hassle.
And also what about all the videos you
may have uploaded to things like YouTube
in the past? That did have
those faces and those car reges,
then what do you do about those? Well,
this week YouTube has launched a
new tool and I seem to have it,
although I couldn't get it working
yesterday in YouTube studio.
That will let you blur
faces and Car Reges is out.
So you actually go in, you get to
select the face that you want to blur.
So it'll automatically blur it.
You'll get to choose the size of the
blur and how long the blur lasts.
You can do the same for car. You
can do the same for logos. In fact,
you can do the same for anything that
you have in your video.
So that's good news.
And once you've blurred it
and it's uploaded to YouTube,
you could download it and use it
elsewhere. But older videos though,
you can actually do the same thing. You
can go into your old YouTube videos.
You can go into studio and you can
blur it without it creating a brand new
version.
So if you've got a popular video with
lots of social proof on it already,
and lots of views, you
don't want to disturb that.
So you can actually do
this with your old videos.
I'm slightly excited about this.
I think this is great because I have
been not shooting outside deliberately
because there's going to be people there.
I did download an app recently called
anonymous that claims to blur out
faces. But because I haven't got
any videos shot of people in them,
I've not been able to test it
out but I do think it's fabulous.
I know you know this, but
you can't just go to Google,
search Google images,
download one and use it on your social
media or on your website or articles you
write.
You know that because you can
get sued and they'll send you
massive bills for like thousands of euros.
And there has always been a search
within Google that you could search for
images that were licensed, which means
some of those would be free to use.
Some of them would be free to
use with the attributation.
Some of them would be free
for non-commercial use.
Some of them you'd have to pay for,
but there's always been that option to
search in Google, but it was a hassle.
It was such a hassle to do that. I mean,
it was just quicker to go to something
like Pixabay or one of the sites that has
a royalty free images
that you could search for,
and that they would have an overall
license that would tell you how you could
use them.
But Google had just updated this to make
it a little bit easier to find images
that you can actually use. So
now when you search for an image,
you'll see that little flag.
Can you see the little white flag
over the pictures of the cats?
And that's a flag to say it's licensed.
So there's a possibility you can use
that. And when you click into the image,
it gives you a link to find the license.
So you can actually click through,
read, see if you're allowed to use it.
Is it for commercial use? Can you
mix it? Which means, you know,
edit it up yourself.
Or if you have to pay for it or give
you a link to where you pay for it,
which makes it a lot easier.
They've also added in, when you do your
Google search, we'll be able to shoot,
shoot.
You're going to be able to search
for either Creative Commons license,
which is generally free.
In fact, it's always free,
but there's just different levels
of Creative Commons license,
depending on how you're going
to use it, or buy commercial,
which means you'll be at, have to pay
for those images. It's a massive update.
And I'm really pleased it's there. I mean,
we have no excuse for
stealing images from Google.
Imagine you were the photographer and
suddenly took a brilliant photo and it
appeared on Google and loads of people
used it without your permission. I mean,
that's what you're essentially
doing. You know that anyway,
I know you know that,
right? So this is great,
but I still think I'm gonna like fall
back on the stock image sites because it's
just a lot quicker and easier
to download images from there.
Do you ever find yourself on Twitter?
Looking at the trending
topics on Twitter and go, wow,
what is that about? Sometimes it
would just be like a random name.
So one last night, I can't remember
what it was. Something like disgusted.
I mean, that's trending on Twitter,
come on Twitter, sort it out.
Cause I'm never going to
know what that's about.
And sometimes they're just like weird
phrases that you don't understand.
So you'll click through and you still
have a bit of a problem trying to
understand what's going on.
It happens to me all the time.
Does it happen to you. Twitter
are trying to resolve this.
They're adding some new tools this week,
or they're testing some new tools this
week and they say, that's not the end.
They're going to do a lot more.
So the first of those is to
add a tweet to trends called a
representative tweet. So straight
away in your explore tab,
you'll be able to see roughly what
it's about from a tweet that is
representative of the trend. So
rather than just the random word,
you'll see a tweet that tells you a
little bit more in context about the
story.
The second thing that they're
introducing is a description. So again,
when you go to your explore tab,
it will have a description
about the trend alongside
whatever, the weird words
you're trying to decipher are.
The tweets, the featured
tweets that they're choosing,
the representative tweets are going
to be chosen by an algorithm and by
human beings.
And they're pretty confident that this
algorithm is going to pick a tweet that
sums up the whole trend.
Now this is available and they are
testing it just for mobile at the moment.
So if you're on iOS or Android
for both in the following
countries. She reads the big
list: Argentina, Australia,
Brazil, Canada, Columbia,
Egypt, France, India,
Ireland Japan, Mexico,
New Zealand, Saudi Arabia,
Spain, the United Kingdom,
the United Arab Emirates
and the United States.
So it's a big test and I've got a feeling
I've seen those descriptions already.
Journalism is in crisis. There
is no doubt at all about that.
Journalism is in total crisis
because we don't buy newspapers anymore.
Right? Since the Internet's come along.
It's sucked looking at online
articles and we're used to that.
We're not committed to
one newspaper anymore.
We will look at a variety of different
sources and read articles there,
which is a good thing,
but that means there's very little
money coming in to newspapers anymore.
So they can't afford
good journalism. In fact,
the sites that succeed the most at getting
the good advertising revenue are the
ones that post kind of clickbaitey
articles and pop pieces.
That's the stuff that's doing
well. And it's a problem.
We know it's a problem, but
maybe Australia is taking
it one step too far.
Australia are passing legislation that
will mean that the likes of Facebook and
Google and they say the 'tech giants'
will have to pay to post links
to news sites in Australia.
And Facebook and I'm sure others will
follow are saying no. In that case,
nobody can post any links
to news sites in Australia,
which is a problem, right?
Because obviously if Google followed suit
and if other search engines and other
tech giants,
and imagine Amazon is in there as well
followed suit and they had to pay every
time a link was was up there.
If they got rid of that,
then how is the traffic going
to get to those news sites?
They're going to need a loyal readership
that can find them without a link on a
search engine or on social
media. It's a little bit bizarre.
So actually what could happen
is it could just destroy the
newspapers that I think this
legislation was designed to
protect. It also throws up some
stuff for us as small businesses.
What if, does this rule apply to us?
If I post the link or if in the past
I've posted a link to Australian website.
Am I now going to get charged
for posting that link?
Is this going to completely change
the way that the internet works,
that we don't have free
information anymore? I am worried.
I am worried about this
update and I'm worried because
if Australia does this, it could
spread well outside Australia.
And then where are we
getting our news from?
And we're going to need to go and buy
our news in the news news stands and
buy newspapers again. And I'm not sure
if anyone wants to return to that.
Linkedin needs you to have a company
page in order to advertise on the site.
And for that reason, in fact,
that is the reason as far as I can see
that they're making company pages so much
better, much better. We
had updates last month,
when you started being able to see who
followed your page for the first time
ever,
and they're just introducing some
other updates to company pages as
well. The first one is
LinkedIn Company Tab.
And this is a really interesting one.
Now I'm making a,
I'm talking about this, even though
for most of us, I think watching this,
it won't be an issue because you're going
to need to have 200 employees to make
this happen.
But the LinkedIn Company Tab will appear
on your company page and it will be
accessible only to
employees of the company.
And it's going to be a space
where those people can network.
We've seen this with Facebook. We've
seen this with Facebook workplace,
which is a paid tool. This
one is going to be free.
And it's in response obviously to so
many more people are working remotely
working from home and they can feel
cut off from the company structure.
So this is going to be a space that
they will be able to network in,
which I think is fabulous.
You'll get things like milestones
from employees. If they're coming,
if they're content is doing well on
LinkedIn, some of that will be featured.
In the future,
marketers from the company will be able
to post in content that they want their
employees to share as well. It's
a good space. I do see one issue.
And the one issue is that anyone can
say they're an employee of your company.
It's actually quite
hard to get rid of them.
If they say they're an
employee and they're not.
And also you're going to want
to get rid of ex-employees.
So I'm imagining they're going
to have to have a second layer,
a layer where they get
approved into this company tab.
The second thing they're doing
is they're adding an events tab,
which is great because obviously they're
promoting events a lot more and events
have become a huge within LinkedIn itself.
You can actually run live videos into
events. You can have networking spaces.
They are actually becoming the space for
online events and that's going to make
it a lot better for businesses as well.
I like these updates from LinkedIn.
I think they've still got a little way
to go. Advertising is still expensive,
but the more of us that they
can get on using company pages,
the more space they
have to put advertising.
You may remember the Twitter
recently released audio tweets
and audio tweets were
It was just kind of a
picture of you speaking.
And it kind of made a
vibrationey kind of picture.
When they launched this,
they got into trouble.
They got into trouble because it
highlighted the fact that they're not
accessible. They're not
accessible. Linkedin, I'm sorry.
Twitter in general is not accessible.
And what do I mean by accessible?
Well accessible means that
a website would be easy to
access for people who have
disabilities. So for example,
if you're blind, you use a screen reader.
So we need to make sure our websites
are accessible for screen readers.
And there's lots of little
tips that you can get,
like naming your images properly,
using the proper heading structure
that will help screen readers,
understand what's happening on your site.
And then the more obvious one, the one
we think about the most is subtitles.
So a lot of tools like
Facebook and YouTube have
automatic subtitles and Twitter
doesn't. So when they
launched audio tweets,
a lot of people who had hearing
difficulties were like, Oh,
is this going to be big? Because I don't
know what's going on in those tweets,
Twitter have responded. So
they're going in on accessibility.
Now they've set up two teams to
manage accessibility and they say,
they're going to have those automatic
transcriptions for subtitles
by the beginning of 2021. And
it's, it's a relief to see this,
but it seems it's a little bit late.
It's a little bit late when other
networks are already all over
this and I have to see what
else they come up with.
Apparently the teams will be interviewing
people and getting feedback on,
on tools from people in
the disabled community.
I have to ask the question is cookie based
marketing over? You know, stuff like
cookies enable Google Analytics.
So they help us understand our
audience a little bit more. Help,
help us know if we're hitting the
right people with our website.
They do things like the Facebook Pixel.
And there's also Pixlels Twitter on
LinkedIn or all the advertising sites you
use.
They help us know that our advertising
is working and that's why we track
people,
but people don't like being
tracked and the latest iOS updates.
So that's, if you've got a newish
iPhone or iPad or Apple device
is not allowing Facebook or other
advertising tools to identify,
to use the,
I have to look at it because
it's got a weird name IDFA,
which is the unique
identifier for your device.
And that's what helps them serve
ads that are relevant to you.
They're not allowing Facebook to access
that unless the user explicitly lets you
access it and let's face it.
I may click yes on all
those cookies on websites,
but there is no way I'm going to let
Facebook access anything from my phone.
When that pops up, I'm just
going to say, no, no. Why?
I'm already going why
does it need Bluetooth?
Cause that pops up every
now and then right.
So this is going to be a big problem for
Facebook and for marketers and Facebook
are kind of rebelling.
They're saying this is bad.
This is bad because they run
something called Audience Network.
And Audience Network is a collection
of websites and apps where
they put Facebook ads on.
So if you run a Facebook ad,
it will go out on Facebook and
Instagram, but also on Audience Network.
So it'll appear on newspaper
sites and other sites as well.
Facebook think this is a disaster because
of course they won't be able to target
those ads.
They won't be able to target them
to people who have those interests.
So that's odd, right?
Facebook say,
they're going to lose 50% of the
revenue they get from iOS devices.
Now I could say, this is a
bad thing. I am, you know,
it's annoying as a marketer that I
can no longer do this, but two things,
firstly, privacy comes first.
This is not a one off thing.
There are browsers there,
Firefox included that
automatically remove cookies.
So definitely worth looking at that.
We know that Facebook recently,
let you clear out your search history and
say that you don't want to be targeted
by these websites again.
So this is a marketing
trend and us as marketers,
you know, we want to complain about it,
but we're going to have to find a solution
because this is the way and the only
way we'll probably market in the future.
People don't want to give up
their personal information
just to get personalised
ads anymore.
