Social Media

If you’re not paying attention to the influence of gaming on modern culture, you’re missing out on maybe the biggest shift in how the next generation connects. Gaming is set to become a $196 billion market by 2022, and five of the top 10 channels on YouTube in 2019 were directly connected to the gaming community. Gaming is fast emerging beyond a subculture, with gaming crews like FaZe Clan helping to take it mainstream. Even rapper Travis Scott recently launched his latest music via a transformative live event in Fortnite, which saw 12.3 million concurrent viewers logged in to take part.

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Do you ever scroll through your Instagram feed and feel like you’re not doing enough with your life? Do you ever see Facebook updates from old friends and feel inadequate in your own everyday struggles and issues? Social comparison is a real and significant issue with social media platforms – but it’s also an unrealistic and unfair measure to put on yourself. The thing is, you’re looking at someone else’s highlights. Not many people post about their daily challenges and issues, but they do post about their wins – which means that while it may seem like their lives are great, and better than yours appears to be, nobody’s perfect. Everyone has their own problems to overcome. But when you’re only seeing one side of the coin, that can lead to negative self-perception.

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Marketing

An internal email reveals that Google is cutting up to 50% of it’s marketing budget for the second half of 2020. The cuts to the marketing budget may be a way to contain the wildfire of reduced advertising earnings due caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This development comes less than a week from when Google is scheduled to discuss the first quarter 2020 financial results on April 28th.

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Over the past few weeks, I have been struck by founders pulling marketing and advertising spend due to COVID-19. The rapid advancement of the current climate has fundamentally altered the marketing and advertising landscape. From March to June, advertising spend is expected to be down 39%, and over a quarter of Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) participants indicated they pulled their advertising entirely for the second quarter. Perhaps many marketers may be thinking about American Apparel’s disastrously received discount campaign during Hurricane Sandy and are thinking about holding off for fear of poor public perception.

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When time is of the essence, conducting a heuristic evaluation of your online shop will help you learn how to increase sales now. A heuristic evaluation is a method of finding usability problems. It helps you quickly identify the website’s health without having to do a long exhaustive study. You will not be reviewing every detail, you will be generating a high-level overview of usability factors best known to influence sales. The beautiful thing about a usability study is that, once identified, problems are fairly intuitive to fix.

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