Transcript
Hello, internet people. My name is Miles Bassett, and this is Ask Wildman. Hello, so internet again, my name is Miles Bassett with Wildman Web Solutions. We are a digital marketing agency here in lovely Lawrence, Kansas here to answer your questions about technology marketing business, or if you just want to ask us how our day is going, please jump in the comments below is where live streaming to our Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitch account.
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Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn. The works there. We’re also on clubhouse. I know we talk about clubhouse a lot on this show here. It’s an awesome, relatively new audio only app only on iPhones right now but should be coming out on Android very soon. So, if you haven’t checked it out already look into it. If you need an invite or something, ask one of us here you can learn more or reach us at wildmanweb.com. We’ve got a lot of great resources over there. We’ve got all of these live streams there and the live stream archive section under resources. So, you can go back and find our shows from weeks earlier.
And we’ve got the full training scripts on all of our videos go in there. So, you can go back and if you, if we said brilliant something brilliant a couple of weeks ago, or if we’re talking about something, you just want to go back and reference it, it’s all there on our website. We also have a section of articles, blogs that we’re posting to all the time. Now we really try to ramp up production there and give you guys the content you want. It’s all built to be just awesome, useful free resource for you and your business. So, check it out there. Also, under the resources tab, we still have our tool kit or a local business online toolkit. It’s just a suite of tools for small businesses to help them to leverage their online presence a little bit more.
There’s a tool in there to help you manage your social media accounts and create cool content. Put out on social media as a tool in there to help you manage your online reviews and get more reviews. There’s a tool in there to get your listings out there in a last week, I went on up. Rant, I guess about getting yourself listed on Google and getting your business listing out there.
So, we’ve got a really awesome tool to help you with that and take out some of the just monotonous work, the menial tasks of getting your business information out across the internet. A lot of other awesome tools in there and it’s all free. So just check it out there wildmanweb.com/toolkit. Alright that is enough with the shameless plugs for now. We’re going to get to your questions. So again, if you’ve got something on any of the topics we’re talking about here, you have a question. You just want to jump in on everything. Please comment below. Or if you’re catching this later, you can email us at askwildman@wildmanweb.com. We have that address growing below me right here in this crawler, if you want to grab it, but without any further ado, I’m going to bring in my partner, Mike, to help us answer your questions, give us some news updates, and see what’s going on in the world.
So, let’s give this a shot. Hello, Mike, how are you doing? Low Miles. We smoke and ashes. I am doing fantastic but getting better Miles. How are you on this fine day? I’m doing good. Doing good. It seems like your video’s a little glitchy here, but your audio sounds good. And I guess that’s, what’s important because we are starting very soon, and we really have officially done this.
Now we’re publishing this show as a podcast as well. So, for your audio only listeners out there that really just want to lean into that audio world that we’ve been harping on for weeks. If not months, now you can check out this show in an audio only format. So, we’ll be pushing our podcast out to everywhere you get your podcasts. Yes, very excited about that Miles. And just as a technical aside. Yeah, I did just switch to 5G. WIFI was very choppy when we first came on live. I couldn’t hear, but. Every other word of yours. So hopefully that fixes it. Let me know if it doesn’t, but
Suddenly disappears. We know why that means I’ve gone to get a test my, stalling skills here. Yeah. A hundred percent, but yeah, you’re right. We got a lot to talk about today on the news front, for sure. Hopefully we’ll be getting some good questions as well. But yeah, some of the big news has also been coinciding was a lot of the questions we’ve been getting. So, a lot of stuff, if you want me to, just to jump into that, we can, unless we got something in the hopper that you question-wise you want to address first? No, I say let’s hit that news desk first. I’ve seen a couple of cool updates coming out recently on the tech side of things. So, we can hit all of those things here and let these questions come in.
If you guys have any questions, please throw them in the comments. Or, yeah, like I said, email us here and we’ll get you later. We do have a couple of things we want to hit later, but yeah, just ask us your questions, but let’s get started with any news updates you have. Okay. I’m going to put that coffee down and start closing here. I believe we left a cliffhanger at the end of last week show talking about the Apple iOS update. We’ve talked about this a few times. At the beginning of the year, I believe it’s been a couple months since we talked about this, but it is officially official. And it is here ladies and gentlemen.
So, they’ve been slowly rolling out this new update across the United States and across the world over the last few months. So, some people have already gotten it, but they did officially announced Monday as the day that it was officially being released. I believe worldwide. And so, it is here. And so, we’ll finally start to get some of these questions. Answered of what’s going to happen with this new update, especially in terms of advertising on platforms like Facebook and just what it means in terms of data and the ability to track people for advertising and marketing purposes across the internet.
And so, we’ll just back up really quick and give you the synopsis before we get into the latest and Miles, I’m going to try to keep this as, as much in layman terms as we possibly can. So if I start getting too wonky, you can, throw a flare or something like that, but we’re going to keep this from the perspective of a small business owner who uses Facebook as a tool to promote their business and not so much from the marketing professional side of things, but if there are some people out there who are doing Facebook campaigns, and you want to do a deep dive with me after this, and you’ve got some more questions that aren’t super technical feel free to hit me up.
And we’d love to, we do a screen-share and just jump in and see what you’re doing. But so, a couple of things here is basically iOS is of course Apple’s operating system and Apple has been branding themselves as the platform of privacy lately, at least over the past several years. And so, this new update is supposed to be in that vein and is supposed to be offering a level of privacy like they’ve never done before and et cetera, et cetera, is how they’re marketing it. Now, in reality, what is happening is they’re really just allowing people to opt out of being tracked across apps. Their data that is, being tracked across apps that they’re using while on the iOS platform. This has been a part of actually the iOS platform for several years now. But the real change is it used to be hidden and buried back in the settings. And what they’re doing now is every time you download an app or when you update an app you open an app for the first time, you’re going to get a notification right then, and there, that is going to allow you to hit a button and opt out of this.
And so, about a hundred million people in the United States use the iOS platform. It’s estimated that anywhere between 50 and 90 millions of those hundred million people could opt out based on this new app update, we of course don’t know, exactly what it’s, what that number is going to end up being. But it’s probably going to be a large amount of users more than 50%. So, what has got that going to mean for us as marketing and advertisers to keep this really simple, it’s going to mean that we’re not going to be able to track people. We’re not going to be able to get good data. And so, our targeting is not going to be as good.
And for those of us who are doing conversions, who are trying to make sales online, who are doing lead generation online, it’s really going to affect what we’re doing and anything that’s pixel based. So, if you don’t know what a pixel is maybe we should start there. If you are spending any kind of money or you want to spend any kind of money on advertising, you really need to be using pixels.
Whether you’re using Google or Facebook or any other kind of platform, LinkedIn don’t simply be boosting a post or something like that. It’s not a complete waste of money, but it’s certainly not a good use of money. So basically, what a pixel allows us to do is allows us to work smarter, not harder with our advertising campaign and allows us to get data from interactions with users, and then train the campaign to basically optimize itself and do better based on how it learns, and the more information it gets a smarter gift.
And so, the better it can be. So, a lot of people are freaking out about this iOS update because they think that we’re all the data capabilities are going to be able to go away. That basically all of the things that we’ve been doing over the past five or 10 years in order to optimize advertising campaigns are going to go away. And they’re scared. And so, this is a really awful, a really good lesson in, in fear, which of course can stand for one or two things. They can stay in for F everything and run, which some people are doing. Or, if we’re taking a little bit measured approach, we can realize that fear is just false evidence appearing real.
And we can navigate around that fear and actually use it as an opportunity. And so that’s how I’m, trying to view this as an opportunity because a lot of people will leave the platforms. They will stop, Facebook advertising. They will maybe even just spend less. And to me, that’s actually a good thing because of course all these platforms are supply and demand and the more people are spending money on it, the more expensive it is.
And so, for those of us who are able to get around this, we were able to work through this latest update. I think there’s actually a lot of opportunity. We could start getting better results from our campaigns at cheaper costs. That’s really positive. And this is just part of the game for those people who have gotten into this, recently, and this is their first big change. They’re really, like I said, they’re really scared. And there wetting themselves, but, for those of us who have been in this a long time it’s just one thing that we know, is always going to happen. The only thing that’s constant is change, of course. And if you’ve just been in a coma for the last 10 years, and you’re like, what is he talking about?
Who’s Facebook advertising Facebook or the last 10 years has built, the best advertising platform in the history of mankind. It’s hit some Rocky roads over the last six months. And Facebook, has been having some serious glitches use which we can get into or not get into. I think we’ve alluded to it a couple of times on the show, but for all intents and purposes, it still is along with Google. The best option out there. And certainly, something that every single small business needs to consider. So, if you’re already advertising, you’re going to be advertising or you’re like, Holy smokes.
I haven’t been advertising this iOS update is an important thing for you to learn about. And to really hear what I’m about to say and to position yourself for a second. Yes. So, a couple of quick things here, tactically that you can do, if you are advertising and you’re getting ready to advertise, there’s two main things you need to do right now. You have to verify your domain. So, anything that you’re sending traffic to any website you’re sending traffic to, you need to verify that domain with Facebook or Google, whoever you’re using it for, but Facebook is making this basically a mandatory update that you’re going to have to do in Facebook ads manager.
And the other thing you’re going to have to do in Facebook ads manager is you’re going to have to manually select. The events and you’re going to have to just optimize for one event now. So actually, one event at a time. And again, I’m not going to try to get too technical discs. If you want me to do a deep dive with you, I will show you how to set this up. I won’t even charge you for this just one-time thing to walk you through, but you need to verify your domain and you basically need to manually select. And optimize the one event per page, per pixel that you want to select for. Cause that’s the big thing that’s changing here is that we basically, what we used to be able to do is we used to have an unlimited amount of options when we were using a pixel on a page.
And so, we could track all kinds of things that somebody would do when they visited a page off an ad. We could track if they read the content, if they added something to a card, if they abandoned a cart, if they purchase something, all of these things. And so that would allow us to optimize remarketing and upsells and, future sells to whoever was engaging with our ads easier.
And so basically, just really sum this up. Basically, what’s going to happen is now we’re going to have to pick one thing to optimize. And that’s all the data that we’re going to get. If somebody opts into this iOS update, if they don’t opt into the iOS update, we’re still going to be able to see, all those things, data that we’re going to be able to see before. And so those are the two things that you need to do right now. If you are advertising or if you’re about to advertise is verify your domain and make sure that you optimize the events on your pixel correctly, that, and make sure that’s in line with the new update and go from there. But Miles, I think that this opens us up, also to just a bigger discussion of, how we’re using our advertising dollars because maybe for some people, maybe if you’re really dependent on e-commerce, you’re really dependent on online conversions that there’s more than you need to do.
I think that this really relies heavily on being able to have a better website and being able to have better conversions on that website, being able to utilize heat maps and things like that. And there’s other things that we can do to fill in the gap, so to speak of the data that we’re going to miss out when this update hits. And so, I think that’s a real opportunity as well for people to work smarter, not harder, and to still be able to optimize their campaigns, up to their best ability. Even after this update fully hit takes place. So, I think this is going to be a hurdle it’s going to be a challenge, but all in all there’s a lot of opportunity here.
And the other thing I’ll just throw in and I want to get your thoughts on this update Miles too, is, if you’re just running traffic ads, if you’re just trying to. Get awareness or some of these things this is not going to really affect you as much. If you are trying to get lead conversions, like I said, in sales online, this is a really big thing and you should probably contact us or contact an agency, to work with them and just make sure you’re at least set up for success moving forward before you keep spending money.
But for a lot of people, I think that it’s just going to be a matter of, can I get better content? Can I have a better website? Can I do these things which are well within anybody’s grasp any small businesses grasp. And that they’re going to be able to, not be affected negatively with this update and, one of the things that I really feel strongly about video right now, we’ve talked about this before.
I know, but that’s going to allow us to keep retargeting, is we’re going to be able to put video content out there and be able to get people to watch that video content. We’re going to be able to remarket to those people who watch it, and that’s not going to be effected hopefully at all by this iOS update. One of the reasons I think maybe some people would want to look at other platforms and just, and maybe not as a way to completely replace what they’re doing now with Facebook advertising and Google advertising, but to diversify because let’s be honest with each other that even if you’re doing everything correct.
And even if you’re staying as much as you possibly can on top of this update, I think the targeting quality is going to take a dip. And I don’t think that there’s any real way to go about that. And so, we’re going to have to get smarter with the content we’re going to have to learn more. Audience insights is going away, which I don’t think a lot of people ever really used on Facebook as much as they should have, but that was an incredible tool that we can know exactly. Who our audience was, who was engaging with our page, who was engaging with our ads? And then what did they also what were they into and what were they engaging with on Facebook? And so, we’re going to have to find different ways, I think, to engage with our audience and get feedback back from them.
And that’s also just another great opportunity, it’s going to make us, I don’t know, maybe lazy is not the right word, but it’s going to make us more proactive again, about engaging with our audience using pool or excuse me, polls and comment sections and feedback loops, and getting this feedback from people, not just relying on third-party data that we were getting back on Facebook, because we did get, I think, a little overly reliant.
On that targeting data, but it was just, it was so amazing for so long. And I’m sorry if everybody missed you know what we were calling at that time, the golden age of advertising digitally, because it was really easy. A freaking idiot could just go on Facebook and a few buttons and make some money and that’s going away. And it’s just, how can we pivot? How can we, like I said, maybe diversify a little bit, not put all our eggs in one basket, but I think this is an opportunity to just audit everything that we’re doing and make sure that we’re making everything that we do a little bit better, fine tuning all the tools in the tool chest.
And so, I would be looking at my website presence. I would be looking at my content, in generating different content pillars. And this is also just a really good lesson too. And something that we always talk about Miles, which is don’t build your house on their land. And why hopefully over the past 10 years you’ve been doing what we’ve been talking about, how we, what we should be doing is, and is using something like Facebook ads to siphon that audience off on to something that you control to siphon it off into your website, to siphon it off into your email list, to siphon it off into your app. The site this update is going to affect apps, which maybe Miles that’s something you can speak to a little bit, but I had a friend I’m not going to go too far down a rabbit hole, but I think this example ties into what I’m talking about. I had a friend call me up on Friday afternoon, completely freaked out because they got some random.
Update through Facebook where Facebook had decided to move them into some new creator page and had completely merged their page from their old page that they had. It’s a musician that has thousands and thousands of followers and years of content stored up on their Facebook page. And all of a sudden, they lost access to their Facebook page, and they cannot, I’ll get it back. And I spent hours over the weekend trying to help him. He’s got somebody on the inside at Facebook now trying to help us work through this. And even they’re a little skeptical that they’re going to be able to get this thing back. And it was just some random, I don’t still know if it was a glitch or what happened.
But just another, word to the wise of backup everything, make sure that you have an admin that you trust that is not, you. That is tied to your assets on all your accounts and make sure that person is up to date and verified and make sure they’re all your pages are verified in that you’re going through all the updates that Google and Facebook requires you to go through because you don’t want to end up in a situation like that, where I can tell you that he’s going through a lot of heartache right now over it.
And it was just, something crazy that happened one day. So, I know I’m really gone a little long-winded little longer than I wanted to on that explanation. So, I’m going to shut up and drink my coffee. And before we go on to any more news and let you go to react to this ILS update Miles, but it really is a big deal. And I hope everybody takes heat of this. And like I said, if you want me to go into a deep dive with you on your specific ad accounts, I won’t charge you for this. Just feel free to reach out more. We’ll all get through this together and better on the other side. Yeah, I’d love to jump in and respond here.
Those, there was a lot of points, so I’ll try to, I don’t know, pare it down to something a little simpler here. A couple of points that you made fairly early on. I really loved there. First was just the fear element. I loved the little line that you put in there really made me think of a quote I’m wanting to attribute to Richard Branson. I don’t think that’s right. And something like if something if you’re scared of something, but it also excites you, you’re probably moving in the right direction. Again, probably butchering that, but the sentiment is there. And so, this update, I think, is scaring a lot of people. It’s freaky in a lot of ways, but I think that there is a hidden excitement as well, where maybe this is the right direction.
I think it’s definitely the direction where a lot of platforms are going to end up moving with all the privacy concerns. It’s like somehow people just realize that they were sharing absolutely everything on the internet and that’s maybe not a great idea. And so, some of these tech giants both hardware and software companies, alight, now Facebook of course, has been one of the headlines here, Apple has been one of the headlines here, but a lot of other smaller, but still immensely powerful companies have been moving in this direction of data, privacy, and personal authentication.
So, I think that this trend isn’t going anywhere, and maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe being a little bit more protective about our information online is a good thing. It’s maybe a little inconvenient for us marketers as digital marketers that are used to just having this wealth of information that we can utilize to target the proper audiences and serve them ads that are going to be relevant to them.
But on a personal level, I think if this may be in a good direction for technology to go. And so, I think that there is a little bit of excitement that we can throw in there as well. Maybe this is the right direction. I think one point that maybe we glossed over here, and I think a very important point here is that a lot of the actual functionality of this new update is already baked into the pie. It’s already been part of the platform for a long time, but it has been hidden. You could go in and opt out of a bunch of things and alter your personal information and how your different platforms and devices shared all of that out. Regardless of if you’re talking about your iPhone or your Android or social media accounts, all that stuff’s kind of been in there.
What they’re doing is bringing it to the forefront and putting in front of you. And primarily in this update, they’re asking you to opt in instead of. Requesting that you opt out before they would just by default threw you into the pool with everyone else. And if you wanted to opt out of things, you could, now the default is going to be that you have to opt into something they’re going to explicitly ask you after you make this update 14 point, whatever it is to be to share your information for advertisers, which you still can. But all the studies that I’ve seen have said that somewhere from like 45 to 63% of smartphone users will immediately opt out of any privacy sharing, data sharing question that they get on any platform anywhere. And so, it goes to reason that as soon as this question gets asked of everyone, hey, do you want us to share your information with everyone?
A ton of people are going to say no, and they’re going to opt out of this. The second point that you made, I think was very important. I want to dive into was working smarter, not harder. This is going to be. Some iteration of the basic economic lesson of supply and demand, where basically there’s just been this gigantic supplies, wealth of personal information out there about everyone that we want to advertise to. And now a lot of that’s going away in a lot of different ways. As soon as you make this update, then yeah, you don’t get this information on Facebook. You don’t get this information on Google, and you mentioned apps. There’s a lot of apps out there that rely on advertising revenue. So, we have this incredibly rich store of free apps on the app store.
How many times do you actually go on and pay for an app? As soon as someone sees, I got to pay a buck 99 for this app. No, no way. I’m not going to do that. Even though you would spend 10 times that without a second thought on something else. So, I think that’s going to shift some perception on the user side of things. Probably a lot of these free apps are going to change. We might start seeing a shift towards, actually having to pay for something because none of this is really free. You’re paying with it. You’re paying with your information when you get in there so that people can advertise to you.
And as soon as that well runs dry, then you know that moneys got to come from somewhere. I think we’re going to see a lot larger corporate sponsorships in applications, this free app provided by X, Y, and Z, and a lot more just basic paid application there. You’re just going to have to pay, to have access to some of these things with actual money instead of your information. But on the marketer’s side, we really do have to think about this as okay. I think working smarter, not harder, there are a lot of things that we can do to present high quality information, to build up brand, to access people, our end users, get our information out in front of them without this cheap, easy pile of data over here.
I think you put it exactly right. We’ve maybe been a little bit lazy. We’ve gotten used to this really cheap that has never existed before in the world of advertising. And now we’ve got to go back to some older ways and probably think of some new ways here to get our information out, to get our message out to the right people in the right way at the right time, so that it can be properly received. We were talking about creator first marketing systems last week, where you are attaching your message to a creator to an influencer. Actually, one of the biggest moves in the digital marketing economy right now is that. Branded content. And more influencer marketing that kind of marketing is taking up a huge portion of the of the digital marketing space.
It’s grown faster than any other spending category in digital marketing for all major brands. People are moving into this influencer marketing to this creator first marketing style where primarily the goal here is to find a way to get your information, to get your message in front of someone in a relevant way where they can absorb it. It doesn’t feel intrusive like of a nauseous pop-up that just jumps in and interrupts your experience of whatever you’re doing, but it seamlessly fits in with whatever sort of content that you are consuming online and doing so without access to a ton of. Information. So, I see a lot of movement in that way.
And then finally, of course, there’s the point that we’ve been harping on for the last couple of weeks, at the very least if not months or years, and that is going to be building your stuff up on land that you own rather than rent what Mike meant when he said that was when you are advertising on Facebook, when you’re putting our content up on social media, you don’t own those platforms, you don’t own your Facebook page.
It feels like you do. And we’ve gotten to a point where it feels like we do, but then we get situations like with your friend, Mike here, and they make one little change in how they’re doing creator pages. And all of a sudden you lose everything because you built your house on rented land. And the owner of that land decided to change the rules. This is their world. They are the gods of their worlds, and they can do whatever they want here. One minor change can end up throwing your online presence and your business under the bus. And it’s not liked these giant tech companies care about whatever small business and whatever that’s going to change for you and your online content strategy.
So, I think it’s going to be more important than ever. And not that it wasn’t before that we do try to. Utilize these platforms as what they are. There are tools in our tool belt. They are not the primary method of communication with our audience. They are a way to reach. They’re just one of many ways to reach your audience and to get your message out in front of them. But you need to bring people off. You need to prioritize getting zero- and first-party data. That’s, getting your audiences, name, phone number, email, whatever it is, a direct line of communication to them, bringing them back to something that you do own your own email list, your own website whatever that is that something that you control entirely.
And I think there’s going to be nothing more important for small businesses in the online marketing space than that a hundred percent agree. Okay. Anything else on that Miles? Or should we keep it moving here? I think that’s the non-technical angle here. Of course, I’m looking at the technical angle of actually publishing applications and keeping our apps that we have up and in compliance.
So, if, I guess if there are any app developers out there that are ever listening to this, then keep an eye on this. They are changing some requirements and you have to go through certain updates and privacy strings. If you are requesting any kind of personal data within your app, that could be location data, or even just if you’re having them sign into your app in order to use certain aspects of everything that qualifies as collecting personal information, you have to go through these compliance steps in order to have your app not be taken down. Yeah. So, I guess I’ll throw that out there just in case there’s any other tech nerds out there listening to this? Again, if you do have any more specific questions on that, we can walk you through it. Just, DM us or email us yes. In business owners, call your tech nerds and make sure that they’re on top of that before you have an issue pop up because yeah.
And a great two-point Miles pardon to have time to go into probably a whole other discussion, but great point about the change and how this is going to change the monetization model of pretty much every app out there. So good stuff. Okay. Speaking of monetization models and data and e-commerce and all this fun stuff, let’s talk about the world’s largest e-commerce behemoth giant because they are also in the news with some relative peace of news.
And that is of course, Amazon. Ah, the headline is Amazon, lets advertisers send targeted messages. For the first time Amazon is piloting a service to let sellers on its e-commerce site, contact shoppers directly by email. So basically, just as Miles was talking to, using a zero party and first party data is the name of the game right now. And as we’ve been talking about with several example, examples, excuse me, over the past few weeks and months that a lot of retail giants are going to this model where they are basically internalizing their own ecosystem of shoppers using that. And then, excuse me, leveraging that data. And sometimes reselling it in this case.
And sometimes just using that to further their own e-commerce ambitions rather than trying to push people in store. But basically, if you are one of the preferred sellers on Amazon, if you belong to Amazon’s brand registry, and you’re one of their preferred sellers through that platform, that you will now be able to get access to Amazon customers and market your products to them directly through email.
So that is very interesting change. A first time Amazon has opened up its customer data in that way, and I can’t help. But think the timing is coinciding with the diminishment of third-party data across platforms like Facebook. Yeah, probably not an accident whatsoever. On that. Amazon is really interesting in that it throws a wrench into that analogy of rented versus owned land.
They are their own beast in this way. It blurs those lines where small businesses I say small business businesses of all sorts are on Amazon using it as a marketplace. And a lot of these places utilize Amazon as. As their storefront in a lot of ways. And as per their agreement with Amazon, they do own their own shop in there and utilizing Amazon as a tool to get them out there.
But they’re also working within those obviously much larger systems. That one’s a little bit of a gray area. I’m curious to see how they’re going to handle this, but yeah, allowing their users and the businesses that work through Amazon to contact customers directly is a clear parallel to expanding one-on-one targeting and allowing people to reach customers directly looking at those zero- and first-party data points that we were making before.
It’s got to be Amazon’s version of that for their business clientele. Yeah, a hundred percent. And Walmart is doing the same thing as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, I believe. Yeah. I think, if we’re going to do a crude analogy here if a platform like Facebook is renting a car, and something that you own, like your website or email list is owning a car and then maybe Amazon is like leasing a car, where you own it, but you don’t. And yeah, it’s a kind of you can create your own platform within their platform or within their ecosystem as I think I described a minute ago. And yeah, it is a little bit of a different beast like that. And going to be really interesting to see how that plays out. Okay. Yeah. So that was some news there from Amazon.
Let’s get to the audio world though. Course some of our favorite topics these days are audio centric, and audio related. Favorite compensation topic, a hundred, 210% Miles. The audio streaming giant Spotify recently bought the maker of a LA live audio app locker room is one of these budding social apps that is a knockoff of clubhouse that, probably wouldn’t have, honestly kept going if it didn’t get bought out.
So, this was an interesting acquisition by Spotify who was of course already a giant in the space, but you will see what Spotify does with this. And then of course our favorite app right now, clubhouse. And you can please join the Lawrence, Kansas community club on clubhouse. That’s our community. They’re going to be doing some content very soon. You can be a part of on that, but the NFL kind of a big deal Miles they have partnered with the social app clubhouse to offer exclusive live programming throughout the week of the NFL draft, which, other than, probably the playoffs, the NFL draft is actually a huge deal.
And so, it’s going to be really interesting because there’s a lot of eyes on the NFL draft and what that does for clubhouse, both bringing people onto the platform and people that are already on the platform, engaging with it in a new way. And so, what they’re going to be doing is they’re going to be Doing a live interview are going to be having conversations with people that are movers and shakers in the NFL.
They’re going to be doing a mock draft for fans. But this was something that I thought was extremely interesting Miles is that we’re in a draft fan can drop into the NFL’s live audio room to hear the teams pick or make their picks as they’re announced and listened to the discussions from athletes, coaches, and broadcast personalities. So, you’re going to be able to get a little bit of that behind-the-scenes flavor of what’s happening in the war rooms, as what they call them. As each team has in their own little isolated area, making their picks and doing their due diligence before it’s their turn to go up there and make a selection.
I think that’s going to be really interesting. And I can just, my mind is just buzzing with other ways to incorporate that audio across other main big events. You think about the music world, the entertainment world, and how everybody would love to be a fly on the wall, backstage, before Bruce, when the boss goes on stage at Madison square garden or something like that. So really interesting. And just another example of big brands getting involved, not only in this space, but with a paid partnership directly with clubhouse in leveraging that platform. So super exciting stuff. And I’m definitely going to be tuning in and listening to some of that on clubhouses this week.
And as we’ve mentioned before clubhouse does this really well, but other applications that are doing something similar are giving us this new type of online social media experience that is. Truly live. It’s like you’re in the room with them and gives you something a lot more. I don’t know, a lot more personal and intimate than just someone broadcasting I’m thinking of ESPN covering the NFL draft where it’s just these panel of talking heads talking at you. I don’t feel like I’m part of that conversation or like I’m in that room at all. I’m just consuming information. Whereas something like club clubhouse in this live audio only environment can allow you to immerse yourself into an experience in a much more intimate and real way than I think any other platform before this has really allowed.
You talked about that backstage experience. I do think that this is going to blow out outside of just the NFL here. I think this may be a little bit of a test run here to see how it goes, but I can’t imagine it not being awesome. And I see a lot of other sports leagues picking this up. I see it leaking into the entertainment space and anywhere that we want to give someone a more personalized in-depth real experience live.
This is the way to do it. Basically, until we get some more, I don’t know, more accessible, more enticing augmented reality or virtual reality stuff. Then this is it, and this is going back a little way with audio, we have great audio tech that allows us to build these immersive experiences. And then on the other side as well, NFL is not the only one that is diversifying a little bit, as we all probably know, sports have taken a little bit of a hit in viewership this last year. And more COVID is definitely not helping the whole thing. And so, a lot of these. Teams and leagues are looking for different ways to engage with their audience.
We’re seeing the NFL jumping on clubhouse here. Another headline I was seeing here on this this in the news here was captain Morgan teaming up with FanDuel to get in front of people in a betting contest. There’s a lot of ways where these big enterprises, these huge companies are finding out that, the traditional ways aren’t working anymore, or at least what’s been working for the last five, 10 years aren’t really working anymore. Some combination of the pandemic, people engaging with things in more and more virtual ways, new social media platforms coming up privacy monitoring coming up. These new settings we were talking about earlier in the show, Companies are having to pivot and be a little bit more creative in how they’re engaging with people.
And this is exactly what we’re talking about. This is exactly the kind of new forms of engagement that we’re going to see cropping up all over the place, the NFL broadcasting, one of their biggest events of the year live on clubhouse, a brand news audio, only social media platform that has completely shifted the paradigm of social media. Yeah. Exclusive content that you’ll only find on clubhouse, which is interesting. But yeah, and to tie this kind of whole conversation that we’ve been having through this, through these news stories Miles together is that I think this is just really, content marketing coming to maturity at scale.
Content marketing has been just a growing force in advertising over the past 10, 15 years, and it’s just, there’s just getting more and more ways now and more and more platforms, more and more avenues, and channels for content to be created and distributed at scale. And that it is creating a whole new ecosystem of connectivity and engagement with your core audience that is completely different than just the old traditional top-down advertising model.
A lot of things in advertising have stayed the same, but a whole lot of things have changed over the past 10, 15, 20 years. And I think that’s the biggest thing is the, just the maturity and the scalability of content marketing and this latest iOS update I think, is going to even push it further along, as I said, some people are going to completely opt out of advertising on platforms like Facebook and Google. I don’t think they should. I think that’s stupid. I think you’re going to have, like I said, better opportunities if you do it right, to have better results at cheaper prices on those platforms. Just so many things, it is a matter of and not, or in my opinion, and that you need to be doing 360-degree marketing and you need to be doing some paid ads on these platforms, but you need to have other organic strategies through other channels that are reaching people on a whole other engagement level.
And it’s not that top down one to many it’s many to many, and its engaging people in a whole new paradigm. And I think that’s what we’re really seeing is the smart brands that are executing in a high level is there, they’re building that out. They’re building out that 360-degree platform and, they’re still doing paid ads, maybe not, they’re not running ads in the wall street journal anymore. They’re not taking full page, New York time ads out anymore. They’re doing Facebook and Google and those things, but they’re still doing a fair amount of paid ads, but which they, what they, weren’t doing social media, five, 10 years ago now they’re doing that. And now they’re also extending, viewing into content marketing.
And I really think that’s the play moving forward. And it’s just really exciting that there’s all of these different, new types of content platforms and channels out there for us to play with. And for us to connect with. Our core audience with it. And like I mentioned before about, having to work smarter and not harder, it’s actually, it’s a little bit of both, if I’m being honest, because we were lazy and like we talked about, with the over-reliance on third-party data, it’s going to be, here’s another crude analogy for your Miles.
It’s going to be a little bit tight. It’s going to be a little bit like having to go to the bar or the club. On a Friday night back in my day, before cell phones and social media and all this, and actually having to introduce yourself, to that pretty guy or gal at the bar and striking up a conversation and, then getting their number and then asking them out on the proper date and not just hopping on an online thing and swiping left or swipe, we’re going to have to do a little bit more legwork and we’re going to actually have to, connect with people. And but I think that’s going to open up a whole new Avenue of exciting ways for us to be able to leverage content and connect with people. And one of those things, Miles that’s been on my radar lately that we haven’t talked about on the show. I am a little bit of a crypto nerd and are you familiar with NFTs Miles and what’s going on in the NFT space right now?
Not as much as I should. I’ve seen it common up. I saw Gary V talking about it a little while, just I guess last week. I don’t know. That seems unstable at best. It’s very interesting though. Yeah. And it’s definitely gotten now mainstream, I’d say over the past month, maybe six weeks or so. And yeah, it’s all the rage and now you have professional athlete, it’s a really big and professional athlete sector, but now there’s brands coming out with their own NFTs.
And for those of you don’t know, there’s good get on YouTube or clubhouse, or maybe we should start with a basic definition where an NFT is non. What is it? Fungible token. Yep. Yeah. So, they’re utilizing technology that up till now has been utilized primarily in cryptocurrencies where they’re utilizing blockchain technology to create unique identifiers that are encrypted basically storing different pieces of this encryption code on a giant collection of different virtual servers and computers and everything.
So that it’s unbreakable, it’s just this perfect lock on a file. And now they’ve attached that to media files to images, to artwork. And so, someone can actually buy exclusive rights to a picture. Or to a GIF or to a whatever, some sort of media files online. And there’s just been this, I don’t know, gold rush towards buying these things since this was invented, since this was rolled out because people are seeing this as just an immense value, something you can buy this thing and actually own this piece of artwork.
It’s everything from traditional artwork to memes, it’s everything out there and it’s just been this wild, crazy gold rush of people who have no idea what they’re doing or talking about spending a crap ton of money on memes. I think that’s pretty accurate sub summation there. Yeah, unfortunately, yeah, it really started out in the art space and then the art collector space.
And then sometimes I think maybe around the holidays, I feel like the sports car collector space got on board with it, which is another huge thing in popular culture right now is sports card collecting and that’s come back into Vogue. In now it is just full-blown pop culture NFTs are, and like I said, brands are starting to get involved with it and leverage it as just another way of content.
But yeah. The nice thing is its collectible Bitcoin has been in the news a whole bunch lately. Those coin, I cryptocurrency is all over mainstream news at this point, which was really interesting to me. And the other opportunities that blockchain is going to bring about going back to content, is that NFTs, like I said, it’s just another Avenue. There’s going to be more stuff that comes down the pipe. And it’s all really exciting for me is ways for brands and companies to think outside the box and to engage in popular culture. In a way that connects to their core audience with back to what that company believes in and what they do.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that you’re absolutely right. Just prior to the NFTE conversation saying that, this is just the natural evolution of what we’ve been calling content marketing up until this point, this is the next stage of what this concept is going to be. And I don’t think that it’s done evolving yet either. Ultimately brands are trying to communicate effectively and non-intrusive really smoothly into the content experience of people because no one is going to stop consuming content online. This is the number one best way for now, and the best way that we’ve ever had to share information with each other.
We’re all living online all day, every day. It’s just attention. Untapped oil of attention. And so, companies have to find a way to, again, non-intrusive really get in on this content and display their message to the right people at the right time. And content marketing is the most effective way to do that outside of just paying for a pop-up ad or showing up in someone’s newsfeed.
There’s no way I don’t think to effectively put a number on the value of just smoothly sliding into a piece of content with your brand message. That’s. Incredibly difficult. But unfortunately, it’s going to be the name of the game moving forward. And then another point that you made there, unfortunately, and fortunately, and maybe we can use this to close the show out.
It’s an, and it’s not a nor or we’re not saying just abandon all paid advertising and go into content plays and we’re definitely not saying don’t do any content and just do some paid marketing here. This has got to be an and not an oar, and last time I said that our friend crystal, over at crystal image here in Lawrence, just comments, something like a good, another thing that I’ve got to do on our show. So maybe we can close this out with just some quick tips on some of the things we’ve been talking about here and how a small business and people more in our space can actually leverage what we’re talking about because not everyone can be the NFL and put there. Live stream on clubhouse for everyone to enjoy that way.
I’ll start off with just let you know, we’ve got a new article up on our on our website and we just released a new newsletter a couple of minutes ago, actually, while we’re live here, it was sent out. So, if you haven’t signed up for our newsletter, definitely do that. We release exclusive content that way, and lots of really great tips and tricks, including one of my number one tips for small businesses in the content marketing space.
And that is repurposing content. I’ll put a link here in the chat here to go to our most recent article about that. But there’s a lot of great info on that in the newsletter as well. The idea here is that you. All right, small business owner. You don’t have unlimited time to create content, but what you can do is create one really nice piece, put some effort into it and put this piece out there.
This can be audio. This can be video. This can be a written piece, whatever it is, you’re most comfortable putting out something high quality and fairly regularly. This could be daily, weekly, monthly, whatever it is, whatever you can do, try to do that. Then take that piece and chop it up. Repurpose it. The easiest thing I can think of here is write a blog article on your website and then take certain snippets out of that and turn that into social media posts, where you then link back to that blog article.
If you are doing video, then maybe certain clips of that video can be posted to social media. Maybe the transcript of that video can be turned into a more of a text-based format can be put into an article, can be put into a tweet out about something. No matter what you’re doing, you can create one nice solid piece of content and then chop it up into 35 different pieces that fit on different mediums and different platforms across the internet and having much more effective content marketing strategy off of creating just one single piece.
So again, I’ll link to that article here in in the comments you guys can check it out later but subscribe to our newsletter to get other tips like that. Mike, do you have any final points here for utilizing some of the overarching themes that we talked about here for the last hour and maybe bringing it back down to earth, something a little bit more actionable for our listeners. Oh, that’s not fun.
Yeah, sure. Thing Miles. I think the most important thing that you said if I could sum it down into one word is experience. You’ve got to create an experience. And so that’s what I think that something like the NFT does, just to go back to that for a quick minute, is that’s why it’s appealing is that it’s creating an experience that is unique and that could essentially last forever, and that’s pretty powerful, because experiences themselves are powerful, but they are usually they’re gone. They’re just moments in time. And a lot of times they’re not unique. And so that’s, I would just take that concept and apply it and remember this if you want to get tactical and that’s a, I D an AI da right? Attention, interest decision action. Okay. Every Glen Gary, Glen Ross fan knows exactly what I’m talking about here.
Okay. But how does this apply to our business? The first thing is obviously we have to get their attention as the content, but there’s more content than ever before. There’s going to be more and more content every day for the rest of our lives and there ever was before. And so, it’s more than just getting their attention. We’re getting a call more about getting their attention, which somebody is trying to do to me right now. We have to get them, get, take them through the next steps of the face. We have to get them interested. We have to make, have them make a decision that they’re going to do business with us or call us or whatever the heck it is.
And then we have to get them to do action. And all of those three remaining steps have to do with engagement, and they have to do with creating an experience because that’s what actually motives. Yeah. If you want to be part of the show, this is not how you call in dear listeners. Rapid man pump solutions. This is Mike. Can I help you? Oh, my goodness. All right. Checking them off. Okay. So, part of running a small business, as you all know, got to serve the customers first. Oh, did we have you back.
Am I back or not? Okay. You can be, if you want, I have no idea. I tried to get… Alright, and final points and let’s go take care this up. Okay. Yeah. So, it’s more than just getting their attention, which I think sometimes people, when they’re doing their marketing and advertising that’s as far as we get. And we’ve, and we forget about the other three steps. And so, it’s really about finding some way that we can get them to engage with us and that we can end up.
Okay. So, we’re going to take this call and go handle that right now. I’m going to wrap up the show here. I guess we’ll have to start off with that. A I D a talk next week as we are doing this every week, live on Facebook, YouTube and Twitch, Wednesdays at 11. Please check in with us there. You can also find us on all of our social media @wildmanweb we’re on Instagram, Facebook, obviously.
Yeah, pretty much everything. We’re @wildmanweb Twitter LinkedIn, you want to find us there? Follow us there. We put out content like this all the time. Like I said earlier, we do also have a newsletter of really awesome content. Sometimes that’s, just hitting on articles. Sometimes that’s hitting on what we talked about, the show here, and sometimes that’s just exclusive content that only goes out on the newsletter. So, if you find this information interesting or helpful to you, please subscribe there. And also, if you find this video useful, please give us a share, subscribe, follow, how to do it.
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