Daily Minute Master Series – June 11, 2019

Social Media

Instagram and Facebook Add New Features for #PrideMonth

Instagram has officially announced its latest Pride Month features, with some new creative and functional tools to help support the LGBTQ community. The new color additions were actually spotted by reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong late last month, and provide some interesting considerations for Stories color-coding beyond Pride. In addition to this, Instagram is also adding in more gender listing options for users. Instagram’s new Pride features will go live from this week – meanwhile, on Facebook, The Social Network is now highlighting Pride-themed backgrounds for your updates. And while most of these additions are simple aesthetics, the change to gender listing options on Instagram is significant, and will provide utility beyond Pride Month alone.

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Snapchat’s Latest Updates to Its Commerce Experience Hint at Things to Come

Snapchat’s continuing its heavy push into commerce by bringing native checkout to five influencers on the app. On June 6, Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian West, Shay Mitchell, Spencer Pratt and Bhad Bhabie received a small update to their profiles: a shop button that lets users buy items from their respective brands. The native commerce feature is powered by Shopify and is the same technology that was previously used with SeatGeek to sell tickets to live events and in a small beta with Kylie Jenner last year. As of now, the influencers keep all revenue on sales. Merchants receive no customer data unless someone follows through with a purchase. “This is clearly a move to cater to the top-end influencers and get them focused on Shopify and Snapchat as top-of-the funnel channels, as opposed to just their Instagram page,” said Mike Rossi, CEO of Smile.io, a rewards program company. “Snapchat’s ability to monetize becomes much stronger if they become the source of the customer data.” Rossi said this new feature puts brands and influencers in a position to use Snapchat’s ad services more to retarget customers who didn’t end up purchasing anything. For Shopify, he said the ecommerce platform sees Snapchat as a yet another sales channel where Shopify wins because it’s simplified the checkout experience.

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Marketing

Salesforce to acquire data analytics platform Tableau

Salesforce on Monday announced that it has entered into a deal to acquire the popular analytics and data visualization platform Tableau for $15.7 billion. The acquisition is yet another move by the CRM that brings in new technology and tools that should bring better data — and understanding of that data — to users. Digital marketers often struggle with data for many reasons, but industry news like this point to a shift from which we will benefit. Extracting valuable insights and takeaways from data can be challenging, and people learn and absorb more information visually. While it’s a useful practice, it’s often a time-consuming task. Tableau’s capabilities should relieve the heavy-lift for digital marketers, and allow us to focus on the value of our insights instead of being “stuck” in data.

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Google brings the Assistant to Waze

Google Assistant has already come to Google Maps. Now it’s coming to Waze for Android in the U.S. in English. Google Assistant will now enable users to do a number of other things while driving, such as make calls, play music and initiate Waze commands hands free. The Google Assistant will likely come to the iPhone version of Waze at some point in the near future. Google needs to be careful to maintain Waze’s unique character as it does these reciprocal integrations. Waze has managed to successfully introduce ads for SMBs and enterprises into the app without alienating users. It has been much more creative and experimental than Google Maps on the ads front and done some innovative things, such as coordinating with out-of-home campaigns. Google will likely continue to use Waze as a kind of ads sandbox and testing ground before importing them into the flagship product, as the company seeks to drive more revenue from more Google products.

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