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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: Reddit’s IPO, OpenAI Wants to License MSM Content, Elon Wants a Bigger Stake in Tesla

Happy Monday, y’all! So a week ago, we were preparing for what we thought would be a light dusting of snow here in Alabama. A week later, we are just now starting to see the ice start to significantly melt.  Many roads in this area are still closed. We had a terrible situation where snow and rain fell the first couple of days then overnight it froze. So by Weds and Thurs, all the slush had been packed down into a sheet of hard ice that covered all the roads and yards.  Basically, everyone has been homebound for the last week. It’s been really frustrating, but thankfully the temps will rise up to the 60s this week so most of the ice should be gone by this time tomorrow at the latest.

Now that the weather update is out of the way, let’s dive into a banger of a Monday’s Marketing Minute with a big surprise at the end:

 

Reddit is planning on offering an Initial Public Offering in March. I will be curious to see what the reaction is to this move. Reddit has had its issues in the past. I’ve been using Reddit actively for about six months now. Reddit has one thing going for it that other social media platforms really can’t replicate: It has a community or subreddit for literally every topic under the sun. So it can be a wonderful place to learn about a niche topic and engage with likeminded individuals that you probably can’t find as easily on other social media platforms. On the downside, it has a serious troll problem, in fact I would say it’s on par with Twitter, maybe worse. My guess is the response to the IPO will be a bit lukewarm, unless something changes.

 

So the New York Times is suing OpenAI because it claims that OpenAI is using its copyrighted material to train its ChatGPT AI program. OpenAI has denied these claims, but is rumored to be in talks with three mainstream media sources to license its content for just that purpose. Of the three, Time has confirmed that the talks are happening and are ongoing. The obvious potential problem with this move would be that ChatGPT would likely lean heavily on content provided by these three sources. That’s a worrisome thing, even if the content ChatGPT used in its training is always accurate. But I suspect this will be an ongoing trend, different AI models will sign exclusive agreements with select publishers, and each one will likely create its own identify based off the content sources it uses for training. Maybe this AI tool is for liberals, this one is for conservatives, this one is for NFL fans, this one is for people who engage in outdoor sports.

 

Elon is asking Tesla to let him effectively double his stake in the company.  Elon wants to have a 25% stake in the company, so the AI products he is developing can fall under the Tesla brand and be developed and utilized internally by the company. Elon says if Tesla won’t do so, he will build AI products outside of Tesla. Which would likely mean building them then licensing the AI tools back to Tesla for a hefty fee.  So could be a win-win for Elon, Say what you will about him, but Musk is a smart businessman.

 

BONUS: She’s baaaaaack!!!!  I was on YouTube over the weekend and I was overjoyed to see not one but TWO new marketing/business videos from one of the smartest people I know, the legendary Kathy Sierra. Here’s the first one, she has a followup to this video as well. Please subscribe to Kathy’s YouTube channel to get all her content, she’s just flat out brilliant.

 

So that’s it for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. Later this week I’ll publish the Tourism Power List for January, be looking for that. I hope everyone has a wonderful and productive week!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Bringing Back Periscope, Angry Users Crash Reddit, Congress Targets the SEC

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope everyone had a great weekend and you’re ready for a great week! Here’s a few stories I found over the last few days that I think you will find interesting:

 

Everything old is new again? It looks like Twitter is planning on bringing back both Periscope and Vine.  I think the Periscope move in particular will be embraced by livestreamers, and Elon has long been a fan of Vine, so it coming back makes sense given that. It seems like Periscope is the priority for now, with Vine being possible for a reboot later.

It’s interesting that the move to bring back Periscope in part seems to be about developing streaming video-game content similar to Twitch and YouTube Gaming. The liverstream gaming space has been trying to develop a solid competitor to Twitch for years.  Mixer bombed a few years ago, YouTube Gaming has had limited success, and the new kid on the block is Kick.  So far, Twitch is still the 800 pound gorilla in the streaming space, so we’ll see if Elon can put Twitter in a place to compete.

 

Reddit recently announced changes to the pricing of API access for developers, and it’s leading to a widespread ‘strike’ by Redditors who are ‘taking down’ some of the most popular subreddits on the site and making them private. It’s actually leading to site outages.

 

The SEC has been aggressively targeting the crypto industry recently.  Coinbase is the latest exchange in the SEC’s crosshairs, and now it seems the SEC itself is under fire, in particular SEC Chair Gary Gensler.  US Representative Warren Davidson has introduced the SEC Stabilization Act which would restructure the SEC, and in the process fire Gary Gensler. The crypto space is excited about this move and it will be interesting to see what happens here.

There’s a somewhat related and interesting political subplot developing here. The crypto space is dominated by millennials and Gen Zers; voters aged approximately 18-40. That group typically tends to vote democratic, with the more younger end of the range being more likely to vote democrat. But for the most part, so far republican lawmakers have been more receptive to crypto, while democratic lawmakers tend to be more adversarial when it comes to oversight and regulation. If this continues, we could see a shift in voting patterns, at least marginally so.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. I hope you have a great week, and see you here tomorrow for my next post!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Communities is Here, Where Reddit Users Spend Their Time, NIL News

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you are ready for a productive week and getting ready for the Fall weather that is almost here! Here’s a few marketing and digital stories that grabbed my interest:

 

So I have to say, Twitter Communities is the first thing Twitter has done in years that actually has me excited. Twitter Communities will be rolled out on Wednesday. At first it looks like there will only be a handful of Communities based around really broad topics. I hope that with time they will let us drill down into some really niche topics.

What interests me about Twitter Communities is that only members of that community can Like and Reply to each other’s tweets. So there will be conversations happening behind a ‘wall’ that are only available to members of that community.

We’ll have to see how they implement Twitter Communities, but the idea itself has a lot of promise.

 

Tying into the previous story, Reddit is going to soon let advertisers buy placements within highly-trafficked comment sections, directly in the comments. I suspect that Twitter has something in mind along these lines with the coming launch of Twitter Communities. Also, I found it very interesting to note that Reddit says that its users spend almost half their time in the app, reading the comment threads. That’s the power of UGC.

 

NIL laws being passed across the country is one of the biggest marketing and branding stories of the year. So much is happening so quickly.  My friend Kristi Dosh has been all over NIL from the drop, and has created a very valuable hub on her site to collect all the latest news and information.

 

So that’s it for this week! Hope you have an amazing and productive day, see you here tomorrow!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Clubhouse is Big in Japan, Canva and Reddit Keep Growing

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you are ready for another amazing week! Here’s some stories that caught my eye over the last few days:

 

So we all know Clubhouse is growing like gangbusters here in the US, but I was surprised to learn it is also pretty big in Japan. Without checking, I would guess that means Japan is likely the 2nd biggest market for the iPhone as well. The social audio space is going to be fascinating to watch, as now both LinkedIn and Reddit are saying they are also investigating adding social audio functionality to their platforms.

 

There will always be a market for any tool that simplifies the content creation process. There’s no better example of this than Canva. So many people in business and marketing are so bad at graphic design, and so many of us wish we weren’t.  Canva slots in to fill that need perfectly. It’s definitely not Photoshop, but most of us don’t need to be an expert at PS, we just need to be able to easily create basic visuals and infographics, and Canva fills that need for us. I love it and use it all the time, and am not surprised to see that it continues to grow like a weed in the summertime.

 

Reddit is another site that continues to grow quickly. Sure, some of the communities can be pretty toxic, but the site really does offer a unique experience versus the other established social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Lately, when I google an issue, I am finding that a Reddit community is one of the top 2-3 results for that search term. If you want to start learning about Reddit, just google one of your favorite hobbies or shows or artists and add Reddit to the search term. There’s probably already a community set up on Reddit for that topic.

 

So that’s it for this week, I hope yours is wonderful, I’ll have at least one more post up here this week. And check out #ContentCircus tomorrow night, we will be discussing how to share the same content on different platforms. For instance, what’s the best way to share a blog post like this on Facebook?  On Instagram?  Twitter?  We will talk about that tomorrow night on Twitter at #ContentCircus starting at 7pm Central!