MackCollier.com

by

October’s Blogging Recap

October was the second month of this blog’s ‘relaunch’ as I like to call it. I started blogging here in 2009, and during that time I had a very inconsistent posting schedule. I would go periods of months where I would post 2-3 times a week, then go months when I would post 2-3 times a month. It was mostly a function of my work schedule and I always felt if a choice for my time had to be made, that work would always come first.

But earlier this year, I saw the massive disruption that covid was playing on all our everyday lives, and I made an assumption that since more of us would be spending more time at home, that blog readership would increase. So I decided to double-down on my blogging efforts.  Over the Summer I worked to figure out what my content calendar would look like, and decided on an ideal schedule that would let me post up to 6 new posts a week.

Now, I have to be honest, when I started this, I figured I would hit a wall after about 2 weeks, and by now I would be down to 2-3 posts a week. For October, I actually averaged 5 posts a week, so I’m very proud of myself. I did have a couple of weeks recently where I only had 4 posts, but I haven’t gone below that, and really don’t want to. I’m trying to balance the perfectionists curse of wanting to write an amazing post every single day (which is impossible) and wanting to write SOMETHING every single day. I’ve given myself permission to write more as opposed to only writing when I have something ‘awesome’ to say.

So the main takeaway from October is:

Traffic up 7.8%! For the first 2-3 months, I mainly wanted to see traffic increase and get that moving in the right direction. As time goes on, I’ll get more dialed in on boosting keyword and page traffic.  Speaking of which, search traffic had a big jump, up over 30% in October! Pretty surprised it took that big of a jump, will be curious to see if that continues.

My goals moving forward are to commit to at least 4 posts a week.  The posts on Weds (Marketing and Movies) and my posts on Friday (Any topic I choose) and Saturday (Toolbox Saturday) are proving to be the hardest to write every week.

Thank you all for reading, I greatly appreciate the emails, messages and comments on social media. I’ll see everyone tomorrow!

by

Monday’s Marketing Minute: Pinterest’s Growth, B2Bs Leveraging Content Marketing

Happy Monday, y’all! Here’s a few marketing stories that caught my eye over the last week.

Social media may be taking it on the chin right now, but Pinterest is an exception. The site is benefiting from people spending more time at home, and I have to admit, I’ve spent more time on Pinterest in the last 5 months than I did the previous 5 years. The challenge ahead for Pinterest is how they can continue to give sellers opportunities to sell through the site, while not compromising the user experience. In fact if done properly, Pinterest could actually add more sales opportunities for sellers and ENHANCE the user experience. We’ll see how well they navigate this.

 

KIND bars are making an interesting move to stand out from other health bars like Cliff. The company is trying to change customer behavior and have customers eat their bars before working out and not as a snack. To this end, they offered $100 to the first 1000 people that submitted a receipt for their products OR a competitor.  The $100 is to help with fitness expenses for customers. It will be interesting to see if KIND has a strategy in place to stay connected to those 1000 customers. This could be the start of a larger and long-term advocacy effort, and it will be interesting to see if KIND is thinking that far ahead.  I suspect they are, given the amount of money spent just on the giveaway.

Mixed results on how content marketing is working for B2B marketers, according to new research from CMI/On 24 and Marketing Profs. On the one hand, more marketers (75%) are reporting that content marketing has helped them generate leads this year versus last (70%). On the other hand, the percentage of marketers who generated sales/revenue through content marketing also dipped slightly (51% in 2020 vs. 53% in 2019). You can review the study here.

 

Thank you so much for reading, I greatly appreciate it, and will see you here tomorrow!

by

Marketing and Movies: Top Gun

A few weeks ago I talked about how the movie Smokey and the Bandit had the greatest movie product placement of all time, Bandit’s jet black Firebird Trans-Am. The movie had an immediate impact on sales of the sporty Pontiac, and the car is still highly-prized by vintage car collectors to this day.

The car played an integral part of the movie Smokey and the Bandit, and did so in a way that wasn’t forced, that made sense to the audience and that actually made the car seem cool and desirable. While Smokey and the Bandit was at its heart a comedy-adventure movie, General Motors no doubt saw the movie as a 2 hour promotional video for the Pontiac Trans-Am. And a far better one than GM could have produced.

That brings us to 1986’s blockbuster movie Top Gun. The film’s protagonist is Pete Mitchell.a brilliant fighter pilot, who is constantly being disciplined for refusing to follow all of the ‘rules of engagement’ while flying. Pete is the son of Duke Mitchell, who was also an excellent fighter pilot, who flew in the Vietnam War. Pete has been told by the government that his dad disappeared behind enemy lines, and his family name has been engulfed in controversy as a result. In fact, we learn in the movie that Pete was denied entry into the US Naval Academy because of the actions of his father.

So understandably, Maverick flies with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, to not only live up to the flying skills of his father, but to prove himself to fellow pilots that doubt him based on the reputation of his dad. Maverick is eventually given the opportunity to join Top Gun, the premier school for teaching dogfighting skills to pilots. This school is for the elite of the elite, so it’s the perfect place for a pilot with a chip on his shoulder to prove himself. Maverick quickly positions himself as one of the top pilots in the school, but a tragic accident while training leaves him questioning if he should quit the school or not. Before deciding to leave, he visits one of his instructors, who tells him that he had actually flown with his dad in Vietnam, and that the story he had been told for years about his father was wrong. The instructor told Maverick that he and his father were hopelessly outmatched in an aerial combat exchange.  Maverick’s father had a chance to leave the fight and save his own life, but he stayed to save the lives of several teammates, before his plane was finally shot down.

The story itself is interesting enough, but what makes the film is the breathtaking flight sequences. It was actually a wonderful recruitment tool for the US Navy, who saw a massive spike in enrollment because of the movie. Saavy recruiters even set up booths in the lobby of movie theaters so they could talk to candidates as soon as they left the movie, no doubt excited about what they had just experienced.

And the Navy will likely see another spike in recruitment when the film’s sequel, Top Gun 2, is released next Summer. As you can see from this trailer, the flight scenes are absolutely incredible:

If you were to argue that the Top Gun films are simply a protracted recruitment video for the Navy, you wouldn’t be completely wrong. The Pentagon worked with the studio to make the original Top Gun movie and has worked with the studio on the sequel. Because the government knows that storytelling is a very effective marketing tool. We talked yesterday about using storytelling to make your blog writing more interesting, and it also works incredibly well for movies.

Help your customers understand how your products or services are valuable and make their lives more meaningful. That’s great marketing at its heart. Top Gun inspired many Americans to join the Navy to be a part of something bigger than themselves. And hopefully fly cool planes as well. But it was all marketing.  The fact that it didn’t really feel like marketing is what makes it so effective.

by

Two Things You Can Start Doing Today to Immediately Make Your Business Blog More Interesting

Let’s be honest, most of us do not get up every morning ready to read our favorite business blog. I have great sympathy for the writers and content managers who are tasked with creating content for their company’s blog. Drawing people to a business blog, and engaging them so they become regular readers is a very difficult task. Here’s two strategies I use to help clients create more interesting and engaging content for their blogs:

1 – Talk less about your company and more about what’s interesting to your customer. Remember that when you are building a readership for your blog, you are attempting to connect with people that have little or no awareness about who your company is or what it sells. So you have to find a way to interest these readers, and the way to do that is by talking about things that are interesting to them, then relate those things back to your company.

I love marketing. Let me rephrase that; I love GOOD marketing. Good marketing often goes unnoticed, and makes everything better, not worse. When I first started blogging in 2005, my goal was to make marketing interesting to people that didn’t understand marketing or care to read about marketing. I did that by attaching marketing to things that DID interest them. I talked about how music artists use marketing, or how sports teams use marketing. And as I did, I talked about how those same marketing lessons could apply to their businesses.

You should do the same thing with your company blog. Focus on your audience, the people you want to connect with and reach. Figure out what’s interesting to them, and how you can tie that to your company. Think about how what your company sells can impact the lives of your customers and make their lives more meaningful. Blog about that impact, because once they see the impact, they will become interested in your content and in learning more about how your company can help them achieve that impact.

2 – Tell stories. Storytelling is an incredibly powerful way to get the attention of your readers. There’s two main ways you can do this, by telling stories of your customers, or telling stories about your company. By telling stories about your customers, you make the content more relatable to your readers. It’s easiest to see the content from the customer’s point of view many times than it is the company’s point of view.

You can also tell stories about your company. This is a great way to tell the history of your company or to talk about the values that your company holds dear or the causes it supports. This is a great way to connect with your readers by letting them know you support causes and ideas that they hold dear, or by talking about your company’s history, and making the case that your company has a long and successful history.

Here’s a simple example of how a company can use storytelling to tell its history. A couple of years ago I talked about how Maersk, a global B2B shipping company, created an incredibly engaged community on Instagram and Facebook. Maersk’s social manager discovered that the company’s archivist had amassed a collection of roughly 30,000 images associated with the brand over the last century. The images were literally sitting in a cabinet collecting dust for the most part. No one had ever thought to use them, but the social manager decided to use them to tell the story of the Maersk brand and what it does. So the brand started sharing the images on social media. This helped educate others on what the company does (global shipping), but that it has been doing that for a long time! And all it took was using images that the company already had on hand, that it saw no real use for.

As luck would have it, just as I am writing this post this morning, ProBlogger left a great tweet with 14 types of stories you can tell:

 

So hopefully, that gives you plenty of ideas for how to make your business blog content more engaging and interesting. Keep in mind that building a readership for any blog is a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency is the name of the game. I will have a blogging recap of what happened here in October on Monday, to give you an idea of how this blog is doing. Even with a much greater output of posts, it still takes a while to build a readership.

Hope that helps you!

by

Monday’s Marketing Minute: Social Media’s Uncertain Future

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone is having a wonderful week and ready for Halloween! Here’s a few news stories that caught my eye over the last few days:

 

And it appears that the government crackdown on big tech and social media has begun. The DOJ has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. At the heart of this is the DOJ’s claim that Google takes the profits from its products and ad revenue, and then funnels them back into locking in exclusive agreements to offer its search engine and browser products. I saw one tweet that claimed that 15-20% of Apple’s global profits come from an exclusive agreement with Google to offer its search engine as the default on its devices! Immediately after the election, look for the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook to be hauled back before the Senate, which will mostly be a lot of hot air and pontificating from politicians, but some actual legislative action could eventually arise. As I’ve been saying for over a year now, the day of reckoning for social media is coming, I’d view Google, Twitter and Facebook as a short-term play, not a long-term one.

 

I’ve made no secret of the fact that my time spent on Facebook has decreased dramatically the last couple of years. At one time I was checking in multiple times a day, now I check the site once or twice a week. But while I see very little value on the site now, their Groups are one of the few bright spots. Building on their popularity, Facebook is testing a new concept called Neighborhoods, which would seem to be Groups organized around geographic area. I think this is a great idea and will be very popular. This would be a great way to discuss issues that affect a particular community, such as finding the proper polling location to vote in an election, or how to deal with coming weather issues. A rare smart move for Facebook.

 

And just because we all need a few laughs right now…

Have a great week, y’all! See everyone tomorrow!

by

Depth vs Reach; Why Talking to a Few People Beats Yelling at Everyone

I suspect there will be an update in the next Monday’s Marketing MInute, but the DOJ, along with multiple states, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The Senate has said it wants the CEOs of both Facebook and Twitter to come before it and explain why their platforms are censoring content. And both presidential candidates, Trump and Biden, have signaled that they will change CDA 230.

Over a year ago, I started talking about how there would be great disruption coming to the social media space over the coming years. Even before this, I began advising clients to lower their dependence on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and focus more on communication channels they control, like their website/blog and email newsletters. Honestly, I don’t think Twitter and Facebook will be here 5 years from now. And I think as the social media landscape changes, I would hope that how we approach social media would change as well.

Years ago as influencer marketing was taking off, I advised companies interested in this space to invest in working with  the T-Shaped Influencer. A T-Shaped Influencer is one that doesn’t have a large following or reach, but who has a depth of connection with their smaller audience.  It’s the difference between an influencer who has 500,000 followers and no real connection with any of them, and am influencer who has 500 followers, who they know individually, and who all come from the same space.

Depth vs Reach.

One of the great failings of social media has been that it pushed us to pursue reach. Platforms weren’t built around communication (which is where depth occurs), they were built around extending reach. Build a network of followers, even buy them if you have to. Share your content  Track the number of Likes, Favs, ReTweets. If you really want to ramp things up, engage with only ‘Verified’ users or users that have over 100,000 followers!

Doesn’t this all sound like bullshit? How does any of this reflect ‘social’ as in social media? The reality is, social media for years has been far more about the media than it has the social. When Twitter first launched, if you followed someone, you saw ALL their tweets. You may think you do now, but you don’t. If you are following Sarah and Tom, and Sarah replies to Tom, you will see that tweet. But if you are following Sarah and NOT following Tom, you won’t see if Sarah replies to Tom. When Twitter first launched, this wasn’t the case. This allowed you to follow people, then see who they were talking to, and meet new people through their conversations. It was a wonderful way to build your Twitter network organically and make new connections and friends. But Twitter decided this was creating the need for a lot of bandwidth they didn’t want to pay for, so they ended this feature. When Twitter users complained, Twitter clarified that it was never intended to be a communications platform, but rather a broadcast platform.

Think about that for a minute. And then think about the UX at Facebook, is it positioned more as a communication or broadcast platform in your opinion?

I think we will see fundamental changes in social media over the next few years. I think as these changes are happening, we need to be vigilant in pushing for changes that bring the ‘social’ back into social media. We need platforms that allow us to forge deeper connections with fewer people versus having little or no connection with everyone.

Depth vs Reach. If Social Media 1.0 was all about maximizing Reach, let’s make Social Media 2.0 all about maximizing Depth.

 

by

Marketing and Movies: The Dark Knight

The original Batman film from 1989 was a critical and commercial success. In particular, Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Batman nemesis The Joker, as well as director Tim Burton’s efforts were particularly praised. So when it was announced that the Batman series reboot would again feature The Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight, many fans were rightly skeptical of actor Heath Ledger’s ability to match the performance that Jack Nicholson had brought to the character two decades before.

Ledger proved up to the task, not only meeting but surpassing the work of the screen legend Nicholson. Ledger’s performance of The Joker was simply a masterwork, his work dominated the film and made you believe you were actually watching an insane serial killer. Ledger was that scary good:

As it turns out, the marketing for The Dark Knight was scary good as well. I wrote about one aspect of the film’s phenomenal marketing campaign in my book Think Like a Rock Star:

Sometimes the best marketing doesn’t ‘look’ like marketing at all. When Warner Bros. was promoting the movie The Dark Knight, it put together all the standard online and offline marketing promotions that you would expect to see for a summer blockbuster. But the marketing campaign for The Dark Knight also had an element of ‘fun’ to it. Warner Bros. created an elaborate online marketing campaign, one element of which required you to ‘decode’ online websites that tied into the movie. If you were the first person from your area to decipher the website, you would be given the address of a local bakery that was holding a cake for you to pick up under the name Robbin Banks (robbin’ banks, get it?). When you received the cake, the icing said ‘Call Me Now’ and included a phone number. If you dialed the number, the cake itself started ringing! Inside the cake there was a packet containing a cell phone and other items from the company Rent A Clown, apparently set up by Batman’s arch-enemy in the movie, The Joker! Campaigns such as this were great fun for fans of The Dark Knight, and helped create a lot of extra buzz around the film.

Here’s the cake that you received for solving the puzzle:

Keep in mind this was done in 2008, just as YouTube was starting to take off, so The Dark Knight was one of the first films to really leverage UGC to help virally promote the film online. Also note that such a campaign isn’t aimed at casual fans of the franchise, but rather at fans that were already invested in the film as soon as it was announced. These fans are more loyal to the film and loved the idea of ‘solving a riddle’ to figure out the online puzzle, then to get the reward of getting the cake AND the phone and materials inside. The marketing is giving an incentive to the winner of the puzzle to promote the film even further. If you won one of these cakes, you wanted to brag about it, you wanted to share with your friends on social media, which simply leads to more promotion of the film, for free!

If you somehow haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet, please watch it ASAP. Heath Ledger died during the filming of The Dark Knight and this film left the world with a complete understanding of what a brilliant talent he truly was.

by

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.

by

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!

by

Twitter Doubles Down on Censoring its Users

So less than 24 hours after I posted here about how Twitter’s political activism was threatening all content creators, Twitter validated my fears. Twitter spent most of yesterday actively censoring a NYPost story about Hunter Biden. Twitter locked the NYPost’s account for a time, then later started locking any accounts that shared the story, or disabled retweeting on the story so it was more difficult to share.

By the end of the day, CEO Jack Dorsey issued a mea culpa:

The general excuse given by Twitter is that sharing the story violated Twitter’s policy against sharing hacked material. But there was no evidence that the story was sourced by hacked material, and Twitter had allowed similar stories about Pres Trump to be shared without policing that content.

Earlier this morning, content creators were being censored by Twitter for even WRITING about the story:

As a result, I won’t be sharing this story on Twitter. Think about that for a second; a content creator can’t feel comfortable sharing their own content on a social media platform because they fear the company will censor the link because it includes information they don’t agree with. Is this 2020 or 1984?

Bizarrely, these actions by Twitter seem to be all but begging politicians to regulate them.  Carol Roth actually made this observation yesterday:

That take may be the correct one. Regardless, Twitter is clearly acting like it does not care if it upsets politicians or not.

Now, perhaps the most disturbing thing I saw yesterday as this event was unfolding, was how my timeline on Twitter responded. The people I follow are a good mix of conservatives, liberals and moderates or independents. I have a good idea of which way most of the people I follow lean politically. Almost all of the outrage I saw at Twitter’s actions yesterday came from my conservative friends.  A few moderate friends chimed in, and my liberal friends had absolutely nothing to say about this story. Maybe they simply weren’t following it, or maybe they don’t understand that this isn’t a partisan issue. Everyone I follow on Twitter stands to be NEGATIVELY impacted by what Twitter did yesterday. It doesn’t matter if you were outraged or thrilled by what Twitter did. Twitter all but forced politicians to take actions on them, and when that happens, individual content creators like you and I, will likely get stung.

When I wrote about this issue on Tuesday, I mentioned CDA 230. That’s short for Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act of 1996. I also included this link that gives a wonderful summary of the protections that CDA 230 gives content creators.  Here’s how this law protects individual content creators:

 

“This legal and policy framework has allowed for YouTube and Vimeo users to upload their own videos, Amazon and Yelp to offer countless user reviews, craigslist to host classified ads, and Facebook and Twitter to offer social networking to hundreds of millions of Internet users. Given the sheer size of user-generated websites (for example, Facebook alone has more than 1 billion users, and YouTube users upload 100 hours of video every minute), it would be infeasible for online intermediaries to prevent objectionable content from cropping up on their site. Rather than face potential liability for their users’ actions, most would likely not host any user content at all or would need to protect themselves by being actively engaged in censoring what we say, what we see, and what we do online. In short, CDA 230 is perhaps the most influential law to protect the kind of innovation that has allowed the Internet to thrive since 1996.”

So if you remove the protections of CDA 230, you could suddenly see sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that currently allow user-generated content, to either stop users from creating content, or severely change or alter what content they can create and share.

 

But that’s platforms, how does CDA 230 protect individual content creators such as bloggers?

“CDA 230 also offers its legal shield to bloggers who act as intermediaries by hosting comments on their blogs. Under the law, bloggers are not liable for comments left by readers, the work of guest bloggers, tips sent via email, or information received through RSS feeds. This legal protection can still hold even if a blogger is aware of the objectionable content or makes editorial judgments.”

So if CDA 230 is eliminated, you will also see many bloggers (especially ones that aren’t monetizing their blogs) being forced to either remove comment functionality, or severely restrict it. Many bloggers will likely see it as too much hassle and worry, and drop their blogs altogether. I think we all can recognize that the impact of eliminating CDA 230 protections would be catastrophic to the blogging community.

And unfortunately, BOTH Presidential candidates have signaled that they want to eliminate CDA 230. Biden has said it all along. Trump has said he wants to modify CDA 230 to give social media platforms less protections, but after Twitter pulled its stunt yesterday, he started tweeting that CDA 230 should be repealed:

This has been so frustrating to me because I think my liberal friends see this as ‘Trump vs Twitter’, so they just assume what Twitter is doing is something they agree with. Without realizing that Trump and Biden now essentially hold the same position on CDA 230. This *should* be Everyone vs Twitter as it pertains to censorship. Every content creator should be unified in speaking out against what Twitter is doing, because they are pushing us toward a repeal of vital protections that bloggers have enjoyed since 1996.

If CDA 230 is repealed, blogging as we know it is probably over. Now is the time to educate yourself on what’s happening today, and how it could impact your ability to create content, tomorrow.