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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Making Moves, Clubhouse’s Privacy Concerns, CEOs Bullish on CX, Not on CMOs

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you had a wonderful weekend and are ready to have a spectacular week. Here’s some news items I spotted to quickly get you up to date on what you need to know in the world of digital and marketing!

 

So Twitter has announced that it is making several moves in an effort to boost revenue. These include letting users monetize their content via newsletters or ‘super follows’ (I saw someone tweet “I don’t know what a ‘Super Follow’ is, but I know I don’t like it’). Now, is this a glass half-empty or glass half-full scenario for Twitter? On the one hand, critics of Twitter have noted that the company has been slow to roll out new revenue streams, so these moves will meet those complaints head-on. On the other hand, Twitter’s recent moves to moderate and even censor content on the platform has led to users leaving the site, either by their own choice or by Twitter’s. Additionally, emerging sites like Clubhouse, Gab and Parler are pulling users away from Twitter. Twitter will likely feel a pinch from users spending less time on the site, and will need to make up for that in some form. These monetization moves can been seen as being proactive moves to increase growth, or as hedges against coming losses. I suspect we will have a much better idea of which it is when Twitter reports revenue for Q2 and Q3.

 

Clubhouse continues to be white-hot among digital early-adopters and would-be influencers. But we are starting to see some cracks in the armor. I’ve seen some complaints about room moderation and letting hateful speech be shared (I honestly haven’t experienced any issues in any rooms I have been in), and now there are complaint arising over privacy concerns. One of the disappointing aspects of Clubhouse rooms is that the conversations happening in the room aren’t recorded or available to the users. Or so we thought. It turns out that the conversations in every Clubhouse room ARE being recorded. They are recorded in real-time as they happen. If a complaint is made about the content of the room while the room is still open, then the audio will be saved and can be used in any later investigations. If no complaints are made while the room is open, then the recorded audio is deleted when the room is closed. This is why I always advise clients to take a wait and see approach with any new ‘hot’ social media platform. Clubhouse could easily be 10X bigger by the end of the year, and it could just as easily have folded by then. As I said in my Backtage Pass newsletter earlier this month, I think you should be aware of Clubhouse, play around with it and become familiar with it, but for most businesses it doesn’t make sense to jump on the platform with both feet. If your customers are already there, and you can use the tool to connect with them in a way that creates value for you both, fine. That’s standard for any emerging social media platform. Always be wary of the hype from early-adopters. And when it comes to privacy concerns over social sites and apps, just remember that if you aren’t paying for the product then YOU are the product.

 

Finally, I thought these findings from IBM were interesting. They found that for CEOs feel that improving CX (customer experience) and building better relationships with customers to be the top priorities over the next 2-3 years. What’s interesting is these same CEOs said that they didn’t feel that CMOs would play a vital role in reaching their goals for improving CX and customer relationships. Instead, they felt that CFOs and COOs would be the main positions driving these efforts. What I suspect this suggests, at least in part, is that many CEOs don’t feel that their CMOs have a solid grasp of the digital marketing tactics and strategies that will be necessary to deliver better digital experiences to customers in the coming years. Let’s remember that even most corporate early-adopters to using digital marketing to reach customers barely have 10 years of experience creating and implementing digital marketing strategies. Many have far less than that, and even in 2021, there are many top companies that are still hesitant to make digital marketing the priority in connecting with customers. This will continue to change, and obviously the shift to digital will be accelerated by moving both employees and customers to home due to covid restrictions.

 

 

So that’s it for this Monday’s Marketing Minute. If you haven’t already, please do click the image below and signup for my Backstage Pass Newsletter. It’s delivered every Friday morning, so it’s perfect to read and digest over the weekend, then begin to implement what you learn on the following Monday. I’m super pumped about this Friday’s issue, as I’m going to do a deep dive into how your company can develop a training system for your digital marketing team. I think it’s vital that all employers have a plan in place to constantly work with all employees to upgrade their skills. It leads to higher productivity, and less churn among workers. Plus, it makes for a happier workforce! So on Friday I’ll talk about how you can create a system to improve the skills of your employees AND I’ll include a special offer on how I can work with your team to create a skills improvement program for your company. But you have to be subscribed to the Backstage Pass Newsletter to get the information, and the offer.

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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.