Daily Minute Master Series – September 25, 2019

Social Media

Facebook Takes Next Steps into Mind Control with Acquisition CTRL-Labs

According to reports, Facebook has acquired a start-up called CTRL-Labs, a company’s which is working on software that would enable people to control a digital avatar, using only their thoughts. Facebook is reportedly paying between $500 million and $1 billion for CTRL-Labs, which it will bring into its experimental research teams to continue its work on the next phase of digital connection. Which could be connecting Facebook directly into your brain – which doesn’t sound like a particularly great idea. Of course, there are benefits to such a system. Facebook has noted that such innovation would help people with severe paralysis, similar to how its automated image recognition technology helps the visually impaired. Facebook has shown time and time again that it’s not particularly good at thinking through the full range of potential implications of its tools – whether that’s how people’s personal data can be misused, how political operatives can manipulate users through its ad system, how that ad system itself can be used for discriminatory targeting. Facebook is very ambitious, and rightfully so, but it’s repeatedly demonstrated that it doesn’t put enough weight or consideration into the potential negatives of its functions. 

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Snapchat Expands Ad Length Limits, Announces New Ad Formats

Snapchat has this week announced a range of new ad and content updates designed to maximize audience attention, and provide advanced options for marketers. According to AdAge, Snapchat is now looking to allow ads of up to three minutes in length in selected formats, up from the 10-second limit which has been the core threshold on the platform. The extended Snap ads will be skippable, but will enable expanded brand messaging for those who are able to engage Snap’s audience for longer period. Up till now, advertisers have only been able to utilize longer video messaging by prompting Snap viewers to ‘swipe up’ to see more, so longer ads have, essentially, been possible, though not hosted direct on Snap’s platform, and not up front, intruding viewer behavior. The ads will be attached to Snap’s expanding selection of Snap Original programming, short, TV-show style video series’, hosted within the app, which have been slowly gaining ground, and boosting appeal with younger consumers.  According to AdAge, Snap is also adding in a new, interactive option for its unskippable six-second video ads, with a “swipe up” option to better drive viewer response (you can see an example of this in the far right screenshot at the top of the post). That seems like a lesser addition here, but the potential to drive more direct response will help Snap advertisers get a better understanding of ad performance, and return on ad spend.

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Marketing

Google’s new snippet settings give webmasters control over their search listings display

Google has released new snippet settings to allow webmasters to control how Google search displays your listings, the company announced on the Google webmaster blog These settings work either through a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute. As far as we know, Bing and other search engines do not currently support any of these new snippet settings. Google just came out with support for these new settings. There is no real way to preview how these new snippet settings will work in live Google search. So you just need to implement it and wait for Google to show them. You can use the URL inspection tool to expedite crawling and once Google crawls it, you should be able to see the revised snippet in the live search results. One of the bigger requests SEOs, webmasters and site owners have wanted was more control over what Google shows for their listings in the Google search results. These new settings give you more flexibility in terms of what you do and do not want to show in your search result snippet on Google.

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Nextdoor in new deals with directories to monetize local search

Nextdoor is probably the most interesting company in local search that isn’t named Google, Facebook or Yelp. It’s not really on the mainstream local SEO to-do list at this point but it’s definitely a massive site with lots of traffic and engagement.The site announced deals home services directories Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor and Handy (owned by HomeAdvisor), which will present small business contractors in local search results as sponsored listings. Thumbtack says that in addition to appearing in sponsored search results, contractors will also be featured on Nextdoor business pages, which are very similar to Facebook local business pages and present relevant member conversations about the business. Nextdoor is likely moving toward a public offering and needs to grow revenues. Direct ad sales to SMBs are extremely challenging and would require a significant investment of time and personnel. This is an easier way forward in the near term for the company. Nextdoor has an opportunity to become a top-tier local search destination in a way that many others, including Thumbtack do not. It has developed a member culture of local contractor referrals and could drive considerable search volume and leads provided it makes the right moves and conditions users to utilize its search box. And in one version of the future it could also challenge Facebook as a local search destination and SMB ad platform.

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