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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Reddit’s Banger IPO, X Launches Articles, Liquid Death’s CoFounder on Innovation

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone is having a great early Spring and are ready for a productive week ahead. Here’s a few business, marketing and digital stories that caught my eye recently:

 

Reddit had its long-anticipated IPO last week, and it went surprisingly well! Shares ended its debut day up almost 50% over the IPO price.  I just checked and RDDT is currently at $50.58 on early trading, so it’s looking to be up again today. It will be interesting to see how Reddit does long-term, the same concerns over moderation and censorship that have plagued other social platforms are present at Reddit. So far the company is doing quite well in public trading, it will be interesting to see if that’s still the case 6 and 12 months from now.

Twitter/X has finally launched Articles. Elon has long promised that he would give Twitter users a way to write long-form articles similar to blog posts on the platform, now it’s live.  The catch (there seems to always be one these days with Twitter) is that it’s only available to Premium+ subscribers. I have all of 5 minutes checking out Articles, but it seems like this functionality could only benefit a creator who is primarily using Twitter as a communication hub and who doesn’t have an established blog or website. Twitter’s play is they want creators to post articles on its platform instead of having creators like me post a link on the Twitter platform and then link to here. Twitter doesn’t want you leaving its platform to come to my blog, they want me to publish this on Twitter, and keep the traffic on Twitter.

 

Liquid Death is a wonderful example of how creative branding and communications still packs a ton of impact. I’m currently enjoying this wonderful podcast with Liquid Death co-founder Mike Cessario where he discusses his branding philosophy, and how to think differently to disrupt markets when you have no money and no visibility. Lotta useful branding nuggets in this one, you will want to dive right in.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. Look for a new post on loyalty programs on Weds, and a very special Bible Study post on Easter on Sunday.

I hope you have a wonderful and productive week, see you on Weds!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon’s Huge Legal Promise, AI Use Grows For All Age Groups, Meta Betting on AI Chatbots

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope everyone is having a great summer and is ready for another productive week! Here’s a few business stories that caught my eye recently, I hope you enjoy!

 

Elon is totally confounding me right now. Almost every day he makes a move that seems incredibly smart on the surface, then 10 mins later he will make another announcement that seems to undercut what he said in the first one. For instance, multiple users are reporting that accounts that they have held for years, were suddenly taken over by Twitter, with zero compensation. Of course that’s Elon’s right, but it is a terrible look and it makes it much harder to defend his future moves.

Then, he turns around and does this: Announces what he claims will be a bottomless defense fund for anyone who has been treated unfairly by their employer due to activity on Twitter.

 

According to eMarketer, AI usage across all age groups will spike roughly 1,000% in 2023 over 2022 levels. It’s not surprising, and given how immature the AI space is, that growth should continue for the next several years at least. If I’m reading the numbers right, it looks like almost half the population will be using AI in some form within 3 years.  I think that number might be low, if anything.

 

Keeping with the AI trend, Meta is looking for integrate personality-based AI chatbots into Instagram and Facebook. As the technology behind AI matures, I think you will see much more use of AI chatbots, I could see going to your favorite rock stars’ website and being greeted with an AI chatbot that lets you ‘chat’ with them.  At first it would be text-based, then add audio, then eventually video.

 

So that’s it for this week’s Monday Marketing Minute, I’ll have a new post up on building customer loyalty in the restaurant industry via digital up tomorrow and….I’m not sure what Thursday’s post will be yet. I want to do a case study post as I haven’t done one in a while, but I will have to find a good one I can share.  Saturday’s Bible study post will feature one of the most amazing stories of faith in the Old Testament, and probably the greatest foreshadowing of the coming of Jesus, hundreds of years before His birth.

So that’s what you can expect this week. As I wrote about last week, I am loving Claude as a tool to boost my writing output, here’s where you can learn how I am using it to write more.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Becomes X, ChatGPT Usage Falls, Marketers Say Relax About AI

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you are having a great and productive week! There is SO much happening in the news right now, in politics, in business, in world news. Here, we will focus on the business stories and let the talking heads argue over the other stuff! Let’s dive in!

 

Elon is making moves to rebrand Twitter into X. I’ve been writing about Elon’s plan to create the X ‘everything’ app for a while now, but it looks like he’s moving forward with his plans. It’s honestly a bizarre move that seemingly throws a ton of branding around Twitter down the toilet. The speculation around Elon’s plans for X mostly centered around would he change Twitter into X and build it out from there, or create more apps with additional functionality, and fold them all together as a suite with Twitter that collectively would become X. I assumed he would move toward the latter, with Twitter remaining a standalone app.  Maybe that’s not what he’s planning.

As I was telling an industry friend earlier, this is the most chaotic I can remember the social media space being in at least 15 years. It’s a lot to digest, with Twitter, Threads, everything. I do wonder how many people are getting tired of trying to keep up, and are simply opting out of social media in general.

 

Did you know this? Traffic to ChatGPT and Bard actually FELL in June. There’s been much speculation as to why, the main reason seems to be a perceived decline in the quality of responses given. There’s also been speculation that ChatGPT in particular has been slammed with server usage issues, and is having to scale back as a result, which has lead to a decline in quality.

Personally, I am hopeful this decline is simply because people are figuring out that getting these AI tools to give you useful information truly does require you to spend a good bit of time with them. You have to invest in having deeper ‘conversations’ with these tools to get meaningful outputs.

 

And marketers are seeing the same things I am, AI will assist with most tasks, but won’t supplant humans. It feels like the initial hysteria over AI taking over the world is dying down a bit as people become more versed in using the tools. As I’ve written here before, AI is capable of being a powerful tool if you use it correctly.  I’m using it in my work as basically a conversational search engine. It’s making it much easier to get more relevant information, however I still have to fact-check info I am given. I’m currently experimenting with ChatGPT, Bard and Claude.  Of the three, Claude is my favorite for now, but I want to start playing with some a few new tools before I pick my fav.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute, I hope you have a wonderfully productive week!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Reddit’s NFT Marketplace, Creator Economy Research, NIL Marketplaces

Happy Monday, y’all!  Welcome to Monday’s Marketing Minute for this week! Each Monday I share three marketing/business/web3 news items I found over the last week that caught my interest.  Let’s dive in!

 

Reddit has launched a marketplace that allows users to buy a blockchain-based profile picture as an NFT. The NFTs will come with a licensing agreement that allows the users to use the avatars on other sites. However it appears the user will not be able to use it to create merchandise based off the avatar design as you can with some NFT collections like BAYC.

This is an interesting monetization move by Reddit.  I think you will see more of web 2..0 social platforms introducing new purchase options such as this. However, this will also create an opportunity for web3 competitors to offer similar offerings for free or tie the offering to activity on the site. For instance, lets say such avatar marketplaces become the norm over the last couple of years.  If a web3 version of say Twitter launches in 2024, it could offer the avatars that users are accustomed to paying for, for free.  Or offer them for free if a certain level of activity is achieved.  It feels like this is a story worth watching and see how other social platforms respond with similar moves.

 

Very interesting research into the Creator Economy by The Tilt, which is a great site and newsletter, BTW.  A key takeaway for me: It takes 6 months for the average content creator to earn their first dollar, 17 months to become self-suficient, and 25 months to reach a point where they need to start hiring outside help.  The rise of web3 technologies will greatly enhance the ability of content creators to make a living off their work, so this research is very important to give us an understanding of what’s coming for content creation and the creator economy.

 

Love how simple and clean this NIL marketplace is that the Miami Hurricanes have for their student athletes. It let’s you see who the athletes are, their sports, interests, social media accounts, everything. You will start to see most colleges having a marketplace such as this to highlight their student athletes and connect them with potential sponsors and brands to execute NIL deals.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! I hope you have a lovely week, try to stay cool and remember to drink LOTS of water!