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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Amazon’s $4B Investment in Anthropic, Twitter Making a Profit, Gen Z’s Social Media Habits

Happy Monday, y’all! Welcome to October, probably my favorite month of the year, at least from a weather perspective. It’s starting out hot, but by Halloween the days and nights will be crisp and clear, I can’t wait! While we wait, let’s stay busy and immersed in a few stories from the business/marketing/web3 worlds:

 

As I’ve said before, Claude is my favorite AI tool. Well it’s parent company, Anthropic, just announced a massive $4B investment from Amazon. This makes sense, as Amazon would no doubt love to leverage the technology behind Claude to help with production recommendations, summarizing user reviews, etc.

 

So Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino recently gave us an update on the platform’s performance. She claims that 90% of its Top 100 advertisers have returned to Twitter/X, and that the platform is on pace to return to profitability sometime early next year. When Elon announced Yaccarino as new CEO, I speculated that the main driver for this move was the sense that Yaccarino could coax advertisers to return to Twitter, and it seems that’s working. I’m still very much worried about the future of the platform, as Elon keeps hinting that he wants to take Twitter/X to a completely paid platform, meaning all users would have to pay a fee to use the platform.

 

How are Gen Zers (born approximately 1996-2010) using social media?  To watch videos…and some other stuff. If you want to create content that connects with teens and twentysomethings, it needs to be video first, at least that’s the findings we see below:

 

So that’s it for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! What do we have on tap for the rest of the week here? Tomorrow, we will have the FIRST update to a Power List, as the October Power List for Technology will be revealed (Spoiler alert: We have THREE new entries!). And on Thursday there will be a new post up on restaurant marketing.

I hope you all have a wonderfully productive week!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter’s New CEO, Instagram’s New Twitter Killer, Amazon Prime’s Killer Advantage

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you are having a wonderful week and getting ready for the Memorial Day weekend. For today’s Monday’s Marketing Minute, I’m highlighting three stories that I plan on delving into deeper in future posts. But for now, I wanted to give a quick overview of each story so you are up to speed as we head into the week!

 

Elon Musk has finally confirmed who his new CEO will be, and it is Linda Yaccarino, formerly of NBCUniversal.  Here is Linda’s profile on LinkedIn so you can see her work history.  As you can see, she has a heavy background in media and advertising, which I think helps signal where Elon wants to go with Twitter under her leadership.  As I said above, I’ll have an upcoming post that focuses on what I think Elon’s plans for Twitter are and how Linda’s expertise fits into those plans.

BTW as a bonus, here is a very short clip of a fascinating interview with Elon on CNBC.  I love his answer that he will say what he wants and believes, and if the consequences of doing so is losing money, so be it. Of course, that’s easier said when you are already a billionaire!

 

Instagram is readying its Twitter competitor. Instagram will launch a standalone, text-based app this Summer, code named Barcelona to compete with Twitter.  The app will be interoperable with Mastodon and allow users to use their Instagram login and will encourage your followers on Instagram to follow you on this new app.  No definitive launch date other than ‘this summer’. I will have more on this story in an upcoming post, but for now I will say that companies shouldn’t be trying to build the next Twitter, they should be trying to build the next Truth Social. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a future post.

 

Amazon Prime continues to dominate the retail membership club space. Why does Amazon Prime have so much more success than its competitors? It identified a reason why customers weren’t purchasing (Slow and costly shipping) and offered the solution to that problem as a perk of being a member.  Viola.

 

So that’s it for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. I will have a deeper dive on all three of these stories upcoming soon, as well as some other issues I want to touch on, so there’s a busy Summer upcoming! Hope you have a wonderful week!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: eCommerce Sales Spiking, Smart Marketing For Virtual Events

Happy Thanksgiving week! I hope everyone has a wonderful week with friends and family! Let’s jump into some marketing stories that caught my eye the last few days:

 

According to eMarketer, eCommerce sales will rise by a little over 10% both this year and in 2021. When you consider that’s a big increase over 2018, 2019, it suggests that the changes in shopping behavior we are picking up this year will carry over. As a result, your company should be doing everything it can to streamline the online buying process on your website.  Calls to action should be clear and consistent, content that’s relevant and that moves the buyer through the purchase process should be utilized. More customers will be shifting purchase behavior toward buying online, and your website needs to be able to capitalize on this change.

Virtual events have been very popular this year, for obvious reasons. I love this idea of sending lunch to attendees of virtual events. There are so many opportunities with virtual events, and quite honestly, I’m not a fan of most virtual events because they are a really bad version of live events. But with a little thought and consideration for the attendees, you can come up with ideas like this that greatly improve their experience.

 

It’s been very troubling to see how social platforms continue to censor content it disagrees with. This censorship is often done under the guise of ‘policing misinformaton’, but the end result is typically that content moderators simply remove content because its expresses an opinion that the moderators disagree with. Which is very disturbing, and will likely lead to a removal of the CDA 230 protections that content creators now enjoy. I’ve written before about how this censorship could affect individual content creators in previous posts.

 

Hope everyone has a wonderful Monday! See you back here in 24 hours!

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The In-Person Renaissance Is Coming

Back around May, I saw a video on Facebook. It was two cousins, both around 8 or 9. They were standing about 6 feet apart, and giggling. A parent of one of the children explained that the cousins hadn’t been able to see each other for weeks due to covid restrictions, and they were about to get to hug for the first time since. They looked at each other and the mom said “Go ahead!”, and they sheepishly started inching toward each other, and then finally their eyes met and they tackled each other in a big hug.

And at the same time, both children started sobbing uncontrollably. It was honestly heartbreaking to watch, and it perfectly illustrated the loss we are all feeling of a human connection right now. I’m introverted, so not being in social settings hasn’t hit me as hard, but I know a lot of my extroverted friends have been struggling this year. Just as introverts feed off solitude, extroverts feed off contact with others. There will be many studies and books done on how this country handled dealing with coronavirus in 2020, but one aspect that cannot be denied is that being locked up at home has had a devastating impact on the mental health of this country. And some experts believe its actually made the spread of the virus worse, not better.

So when the country fully reopens, there will be a great desire to return to normalcy. But the realty is, we have all adjusted our lives this year, and some of those adjustments will become permanent changes. I can see two big behavioral changes that we will adopt as a society moving forward:

1 – We will do far less in-person shopping for food. Trips to the grocery store will more often be to pick up an order that we placed online, instead of going to shop for food while there. We will also use delivery services more both for meals from restaurants, and to order from services that offer meals we can prepare at home.

2 – Many companies will decide to make remote work from home permanent for their employees. This year has been a trial-by-fire for many companies in embracing remote work, but many companies will find out it makes sense for them and their employees.

 

So think about how that will change our behavior. A lot of the trips out to ‘run errands’ like grocery shopping, picking up dinner, etc, will now be handled via delivery services.  So fewer trips away from the house. And more of us will be working from home, so that will eliminate even more trips away from home.

But, spending all this time at home will also greatly reduce the amount of in-person contact we will have with friends and co-workers. So I starting in 2021, we will see many of us placing a greater emphasis on leaving the house in order to meet with friends, co-workers and family members. A greater percentage of our trips away from the house will be of a social nature to connect with others.

And I think this will go beyond just heading to a bar or movie with friends. I think you’ll see more deliberate thought put into our social gatherings, and they will be considered more special and meaningful. For example, for Halloween 2021, I could the return of community hayrides, maybe school Halloween carnivals, community-wide trick or treating that incorporates ways for parents to have social time together as well. Activities that were normally aimed at individuals could be promoted as group affairs. For instance, more guided tours for groups at museums, giving you a chance to sign up to join a group instead of going alone.

For companies, I could see a greater emphasis on trips for employees, and in-person team-building exercises. Maybe the annual company retreat becomes a bi-annual event every six months. Conferences could begin to incorporate fun social events in the evening rather than just telling attendees they were on their own at 5pm, ‘See you tomorrow!’ And conferences are going to come back in a big way starting I think in Fall of 2021 moreso than in the Spring. So those of you that are about to start planning for next year’s events, focus on building time into the schedule for attendees to interact with each other. We will want and need that time.

Human beings are social creatures. We need contact, we need to interact with each other. We were not meant to live our lives in fear locked up in our homes. This is not healthy for our bodies or souls. Starting in 2021 I believe you’ll see us yearning for more in-person contact and social events. The smart companies are the ones that will provide more social options for us.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Online Holiday Sales Spike, Top Brands For Loyalty, Turn Blog Posts Into Tweet Threads

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you have a wonderful week planned, cooler weather is here, and Halloween is right around the corner. One of my favorite times of the year!

 

This is very believable. If you sell products or services online, you need to be auditing your website to make sure the purchase process is as smooth and frictonless as possible. Also keep in mind that even after the country completely reopens, many shoppers will continue to purchase more online, so building your website to handle eCommerce sales should be a priority moving forward.

https://twitter.com/shonali/status/1315746614552801281

 

So there’s two brands that I wanted to focus on for this list of top brands customers are loyal towards; Amazon and Dominos. First, I wonder how much of the loyalty people have for Amazon is associated with the brand itself, and how much is loyalty for the fact that it offers a level of price and convenience that its competitors cannot. I ask because I am constantly hearing from Prime users that lament they dislike the Amazon brand, but keep buying from it simply because it’s faster and cheaper.

As for Dominos, we all suspected that the covid-related slowdowns and more people staying at home would create opportunities for fast food brands in particular to win big business. It seems Dominos is one of the big winners in scoring loyalty from customers.

 

This is a feature that raised some eyebrows in the blogging community. WordPress has added the ability to turn blog posts into tweet threads. Honestly, I’m not a fan of this feature. As the author of this post points out, this seems to do a better job of drawing attention to your tweets than it would the blog post that the tweets are being created from. My advice would be to test ideas for blog posts as tweets on Twitter. For instance, if you have a topic you are thinking about writing a blog post on, bring it up on Twitter first, and see what the reaction is from Twitter users. You very well may find that you can then create a wonderful blog post from the conversation that happened on Twitter.

So there’s a few stories that caught my eye over the last few days! Just a reminder that we are headed into election season, just 15 days away! Be very mindful that there will be a LOT of very unbelievable and inaccurate ‘news’ being shared. Look at everything with a skeptical eye, and if something sounds too crazy to be true, verify the information with sources you trust. Have a wonderful week, see you tomorrow!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Tik Tok Partners with Oracle, Digital Body Language, How Gen Zers View Brands

Hey y’all! Let’s get cracking with another week of business and marketing goodness!

 

Tik Tok rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy the company then an hour or so later turned around and agreed to partner with Oracle as a ‘trusted tech partner’. This is not a sale (at least not yet), and it appears Oracle will help manage US operations for Tik Tok, likely lending its cloud computing technology.

 

Digital body language is a wonderful topic that too few marketers think about.  My dear friend Kelly shared this fabulous article that breaks down what can be happening on your site and how you can convince the visitor to become a buyer:

 

 

Now this graph in this tweet immediately caught my attention:

First, it’s ridiculous to combine Gen Xers with our Boomer parents as we are completely different groups, but whatevs. But what really caught my attention was note the percentage that choose brands based on friend/family recommendations falls with every age group. Now I checked the fine print and the results are coming from a survey of Snapchat users, so that will likely skew the results some.

But I found this quote from the article about how Gen Zers view recommendations from friends and family to be fascinating:

“Part of that, of course, is that such recommendations are now much easier to come by, as you can see what people like and advocate for via social media. Past generations didn’t always have this as a reference point, so it makes sense that they’re less instinctively reliant on the same.

But Gen Z has adapted to the modern communications environment, which underlines the importance of facilitating advocacy through influencers and regular customers on social networks.”

This tends to suggest that who Gen Zers consider to be ‘friends’ could be much broader than their older counterparts. In fact, could this even be suggesting that Gen Zers view influencers they like as their ‘friends’? I think this is a very interesting area to explore and research further. Perhaps the definition of who a ‘friend’ is more abstract for the youngest digital natives, and becomes more literal as we age? Again, I find this fascinating and worthy of further research.

 

Oh Twitter…you just can’t help yourself, can you? It appears that Twitter is now positioning itself to be in a position to censor any election day tweets that discuss who has won or lost any of the races on Election Day in November:

This is so scary for so many reasons. Here’s a hypothetical; Let’s say a group of hardcore Trump supporters were put in charge of monitoring tweets on election day. And let’s say these Trump supporters are ACTIVIST supporters, who are put in charge of monitoring. In theory, they could delete any tweet that contains phrases like ‘Biden will win’ or ‘I think Biden will win’ and claim it is ‘unverified election results’. That would result in there appearing to be almost no excitement for the Biden campaign, which could easily influence undecided independent voters. Moves like this are why we are likely headed toward a day when big social media sites are regulated by the government as publishers, not platforms.