News

Good morning. It’s Monday, November 6th. Tomorrow is Election Day throughout the U.S. Please vote. Also, Veteran’s Day is Saturday. Many people and companies will observe the holiday on Friday.

Highlights
  • Google’s Local Services program expands
  • Facebook generated $800 million per week last quarter.
  • A new look at voice search shows 20% of mobile Google searches are made by voice. That’s a huge number showing mobile’s acceleration as the device we use.

Google Local Services is the new name of the pilot program called Home Services. The program is open to locksmiths, plumbers, electricians, HVAC, and garage door services. Those categories aren’t new–they were prominent in lead generation businesses years ago and the yellow pages before that. 

Google is broadening the program to 30 markets from the initial 17. Their announcement

Facebook main campus entrance
Facebook had a great and a terrible week.

The financial results are staggering: $10.3 billion in quarterly revenue, which is 47% growth over last year’s revenue. There were 20 million total users ten years ago. There are now 1.37 billion DAILY users.

The terrible part of Facebook’s week came on Capitol Hill, and although they shared Congressonal scoldings with Google and Twitter, most media latched on to the social media company’s advertising of Russian-based messages targeting U.S. cultural divisions. Here is a link to the ads that House Democrats posted online.

After looking them over, head over to Patrick Ruffini’s “Why Russia’s Facebook ad campaign wasn’t such a success” in the Post.

Spotlight Headlines

The best article I’ve read about this industry in years is the NYT’s “How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Start-Ups. Allow some time. It’s 7,000+ words.

Also check out SitePro News’ infographic 10 Essential Holiday Marketing Tactics for 2017 and Summit Hosting’s fun take on “Office Jargon Sentiment”

Monday Coffee Break

Max Lanman shot a video to help his girlfriend sell her 1996 Honda.

He made the video “special” because that’s one of his superpowers. This will be one of the week’s top viral videos. It’s been accelerating (groan) since its launch Thursday.

 

 

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Silver Beacon’s Weekly Briefing for Leaders

 

Good morning. It’s Monday, October 30th. Stock increases after earnings calls added $181 billion to the market cap of the Big Five online companies. Execs from two of the five and Twitter are headed to DC to testify before the Senate Judiciary committee beginning Tuesday. What happens there will have a big effect on future regulatory oversight.

Highlights
  • Facebook and Twitter are introducing new advertising disclosures for every ad.
  • Google’s “mobile first” index is live and rolling out across the Internet.
  • Want to book a hotel room on Google? How about have Amazon open your front door? Both initiatives launched widely last week.

Questions or comments?  Click the green button below & write George. 

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Facebook says that advertisers will have to verify their identity in the future.The social media company will also include all ads in a searchable archive that lets regular users see every ad an advertiser has created. The age, location, gender, and costs will also be public information.

I shared the news Friday with a group of more than 100 Facebook advertising professionals when it came out. Their reaction was silence mixed with incredulity. Their reaction was similar to mine. None of us seemed to expect Facebook to go that far that fast. 

Facebook Ads VP Rob Goldman: “Starting next month, people will be able to click “View Ads” on a Page and view ads a Page is running on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger — whether or not the person viewing is in the intended target audience for the ad. All Pages will be part of this effort, and we will require that all ads be associated with a Page as part of the ad creation process.” Goldman’s post

Your organization’s ads will also be visible. We’ll all have to adapt and live with this new transparency.

Facebook followed Twitter’s earlier news that Russian government news affiliates RT and Sputnik are now banned from advertising on Twitter. All three companies are desperately hoping that they can sell Congress on self-regulation of online advertising.

This is important regardless of your politics after the MIT Technology Review published “How Tweets Translate into Votes” on Thursday. The study found that two UK elections showed “…politicians with Twitter accounts do get a higher share, though not by much.”

 

Despite announcing a 2018 launch date, Google has launched its “mobile first index” initiative to some websites and will continue adding more, according to Google exec Gary Ilyes at a search conference. Search Engine Land reported the news and quoted Ilyes as saying that this was an expansion of the testing with live sites. (SEL’s coverage)

You need to care about this because Google will be using mobile website information as its primary index for all searches. We’ve long since passed the 50% of search in mobile milestone. You probably work on a computer all day. Your org’s website performs differently on a mobile. Test your website’s speed, appearance, and everything else on mobile. The window to make changes before this shift occurs is narrowing fast.

Google also broadened its “Book Online” feature to include businesses like barbershops (pictured above), salons, yoga studios, and more. Google is treating this like we told you last week that Facebook was addressing food delivery. First, they’ll be a big repository of other companies. Then they’ll presumably take over the industry. Provider list here.

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Monday’s Break Time

Pumpkin pie season is upon us once we get past Tuesday’s mini candy bar holiday. And now we learn courtesy of Marketplace that almost all commercial pumpkin pies are actually flavored squash. Cookbook author Stella Parks says that there are no labeling rules for pumpkins vs squash, and we’re not eating a pie made from those big orange things. Read the rest.
 

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Spotlight

Silver Beacon Marketing’s Weekly Briefing

 

Good morning. It’s Monday, October 9. This day is still called Columbus Day on federal calendars. There is no regular mail delivery and some big banks are closed. FDR created Columbus Day in the late 1930s, and there is a big movement to rename or abolish the well-intentioned but historically inaccurate holiday. Time has a good article on the controversy.

Highlights
  • The Russian political ads that ran on Facebook were divisive at best.
  • Yahoo admits that all customers were hacked in 2013, not just a third of them.
  • Maybe you’ll use Walmart and Amazon for mail next year. We’ll explain below.

Questions or comments?  Click the green button below & write George.
 

We continue discovering the bad things that happened to our privacy because of data breaches over the last several years. 

That includes Yahoo (now a part of Verizon-owned Oath) admitting that all 3 billion user accounts were compromised in 2013 instead of the 1 billion previously claimed. The breach is four years old so there is little if anything you can do now to protect your privacy from that.

We’ve also learned that the bit.ly and Kickstarter website breaches of 15 million records are now available on black markets. Lifehacker has more info at the link below.

And we’ve been telling you how the Trump administration’s FCC guidance regarding privacy has been to allow Internet companies to sell your browsing data. Google announced this week to publishers that it is testing Insight Engine, a new service that “will include age, gender, relevant search history, shopping history and what visitors seem in the market to buy”.

Learn more: NPR coverage of Yahoo, Lifehacker on data availability, AdAge on Google selling data

Facebook sent Congressional investigators more than 3,000 ads that it says were purchased by Russian organizations in 2016. The post on the left, featuring a hoax image of Hillary Clinton and Osama bin Laden, is reportedly typical of the content. Ads included doctored images of Secretary Clinton in a jail cell and images that sought to exacerbate racial and other divides.

Facebook is now warning advertisers that approval for political and advocacy ads will be delayed by human reviews.

We’re also learning that antivirus software maker Kaspersky may have assisted the Russian government in obtaining classified information from an NSA contractor’s home computer. We warned readers about Kaspersky last month and suggested they use alternatives like AVG or BitDefender. We’ve got a link below from Ars Technica quoting the original article in the Wall Street Journal, which is only available to subscribers.

Learn more: Faked Facebook posts, Russian anti-virus software, Facebook’s comments

Walmart and Amazon traded punches again this week in their battle for 21st century marketplace dominance. Walmart bought Parcel, a logistics company that delivers in 2 hour windows and integrates with smartphone apps.

That move comes on the heels of media reports that Amazon is testing a program called Seller Flex that will compete with UPS and FedEx for the company’s business. Amazon accounts for 5%-10% of UPS revenue and “less than 3%” of FedEx revenue.

Remember that Amazon’s most profitable business is AWS, its web-services division which generated $4 billion in revenue and a 25% profit margin in the second quarter. AWS began as an ancillary service reselling Amazon’s scalable computing services. There’s no reason why the same can’t be true of an Amazon delivery service.

And Amazon announced Friday that AWS will be General Electric’s preferred cloud service provider.

Learn more: Walmart’s Parcel announcement, AdAge on Amazon delivery, Amazon GE announcement

Spotlight Headlines

  • Google search results for movies and television will begin showing audience reviews as the search engine looks for unique data to display.
  • Squaring off against Google, Facebook announced it will expand its use of Wikipedia information throughout the site.
  • Puerto Rico may get cell service back faster thanks to permission granted to Google to launch its large scale Project Loon balloons carrying tech equipment overhead.
  • But the communications world also got word of a loss this week: AOL’s famous AIM chat service will close on December 15, twenty years after its launch.
  • Remember when we told you that Amazon was testing a personal clothing service? They just bought Body Labs, a company that makes 3D images of people so they can try on clothes via computer images.

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