The weekly Digital Download is out. Get all the Marketing hot news, quick tips, and highlights you need to get you through the week, rolled up into a five-minute read.

Want to learn more about a specific topic? Click here to ask us anything!

In the News

Hot Off the Press

• All the New Emoji You’ll Find in iOS 14.5
  • Sure, iOS 14.5 comes with a ton of new and useful features including the ability to unlock your iPhone with your Apple Watch, more Siri customization, App Tracking Transparency, and more. But we all know the most exciting feature is the assortment of new Emoji.

• Changes at Basecamp
  • Basecamp, the maker of email app Hey, is banning social and political discussions at the company, its CEO Jason Fried announced today. In his post, Fried makes it clear that Basecamp is not a social impact company. In Fried’s opinion, Basecamp does not need to solve social problems or “chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure.” On the benefits front, employees will no longer be able to access fitness benefits, a wellness allowance, a farmer’s market share or support for continuing education. Fried refers to those as “paternalistic benefits,” and said it’s none of Basecamp’s business what employees do outside of work.

• Twitter Launches Initial Test of ‘Professional Profiles’ for Brands and Creators
  • After previewing them at its recent Analyst Day overview, Twitter is now officially launching a live test of its new ‘Professional Profiles’, which will provide a new way for brands to present themselves on the platform, with dedicated tools and features aligned specifically with work use. The new Professional profiles include more information, including address and contact info, within the main profile frame, and an updated layout, in variance to personal handles. This format is slightly different to the one Twitter featured in a preview of its Professional profiles early last month, which included more options like business category and new badge types.

• Clubhouse Announces Exclusive Content Deal with NFL, its First Official Sports Partnership
  • While competitors continue to emerge, Clubhouse is looking to capitalize on its opportunities with the announcement of a new, exclusive content deal with the NFL, which will see the league broadcast via a range of Rooms in the lead-up to the 2021 NFL Draft. The deal makes the NFL the first major sports league to collaborate with Clubhouse on official programming and could help Clubhouse connect with more NFL fans around the event.

• • Snapchat Rises to 280 Million Users, Reports Strong Take-Up of TikTok-Like ‘Spotlight’ Option
    • “Who still uses Snapchat?” – The response to every post about Snapchat. Careful. You are likely to get 280 Million DMs calling you a Boomer. Snapchat is now being used by 280 million people every day, a 22% increase in year-over-year performance, and the app’s biggest increase in its YoY usage growth in more than 3 years. Snap’s original content continues to play a key role in attracting new users more broadly, and boosting in-app engagement, with over 20 million people watching the new series “Ryan Doesn’t Know” starring Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds. Snap has also highlighted the growth of its TikTok clone ‘Spotlight‘, which, in addition to being a feed of short video clips, also provides cash incentives – up to $1 million per day – for the best, most engaging Spotlight shorts.

via GIPHY

• The Future of Social Media is Sharing Less, Not More
  • Almost every platform we use encourages us to share as much of our personal lives as possible. Instead of the conscious curation that characterized social networks of the past, these platforms continue promising users that if they simply post more about themselves and their friends, they can have more fulfilling social experiences. However, public conversations around the darker elements of social media platforms – from data collection and privacy issues to fake news and propaganda – have led to more thinking on how we should use them (or if they should even be used at all). In the next decade, as we reassess our relationship with social media – and by extension, the Big Tech companies that run them – we will see more people leave public platforms entirely, sticking instead to small communities and friendship groups on more private platforms.

• The Role of Branding in B2B Storytelling
  • Scream it from the rooftop. Branding is more than a logo. Branding is not one single piece of the process, it is the entire process – from brand strategy, to brand identity, to brand marketing. Read JB’s blog to learn more about the branding process.

Creativity

Out of the Box

• What Justin Bieber Can Teach CEOs About Storytelling
  • Most megabrands walk through their histories with sterile timelines of milestones and old yellow photos. McKesson even uses a horse and buggy graphic to link to its “Our History” page. State Farm has no timeline and barely covers its founder’s story in two paragraphs. Even worse are the lackadaisical efforts by the hottest small businesses: 38 of the top 50 fastest-growing private companies on the 5000 have neither timelines nor stories about themselves on their websites. It seems emotional connection and entrepreneurial inspiration takes a back seat to mission and value statements and leadership photos. However, there’s an old public relations credo: If you don’t tell your story, somebody else will—and it may not be the story you want told.

via GIPHY

• Marketing Creativity – How to Move Forward During a Pandemic and Beyond
  • It’s no secret that Covid-19 has transformed the marketing landscape – in fact, 99designs discovered in September that a staggering 74% of marketers had been working from home since March. How then, has an industry so focused on collaboration for creativity, managed to thrive? Let’s dig a little deeper into these topics and discover how the marketing arm of your business can embrace creativity to flourish during challenging times.

• Zoom’s Immersive View Could Make Video Calls Feel a Bit More In-Person
  • Zoom is rolling out a video background feature called Immersive View that could make video calls feel a bit more like an office meeting. Immersive View builds on the virtual background features Zoom already has but focuses on actually placing meeting attendees in a realistic-looking location, rather than just switching out a flat background. Meeting hosts can enable Immersive View from the same menu where you can find Speaker View and Gallery View; from there, Zoom will automatically place attendees in a variety of built-in virtual scenes like a board room or auditorium, or the meeting host can manually place them themselves.

Tricks of the Trade

Tips and Tricks

• • How to Properly Setup Video SEO in WordPress (Step by Step)
    • Video SEO is the process of optimizing the videos on your site, so they’ll rank higher in the search results pages. This is similar to general WordPress SEO best practices except it’s geared towards your video content. There’s a lot you can do to optimize your videos before you embed them in your WordPress blog posts, like choosing the best video hosting. However, once they’re live on your website, you need to make sure they’re going to bring you maximum traffic. Keep reading to learn how to set up a video sitemap in WordPress to improve your video SEO, step by step.

via GIPHY

• 5 Bad SEO Content Tactics You Should Have Abandoned Already
  • Despite all this, bad SEO content tactics proliferate. They continue to haunt your webpages, search rankings, traffic, and conversions. To lift your content and website out of the 4th or 5th page of search results (A.K.A. Google’s dung heap), it’s time to get with the times. Don’t worry, though – you can catch up to modern SEO and vastly improve your search visibility. Take a look at some of the most common bad SEO content tactics and learn how you can banish them from your web presence for good.

• Medical Images, Social Media and Consent
  • Medical images have always had an extended role, beyond their clinical purpose, to help educate professionals. With the explosion of the internet, and now social media, the dissemination of information is changing rapidly, and sometimes unrecognizably. This change has led to the sharing of patient imagery on these platforms, often in short-hand form, to aid the telling of clinical stories, to highlight a teaching point, or to ask for peer advice or support. Medical images on social media are often provided without specific written consent and made available on a publicly accessible platform, but the issue of consent is an important one.

• Video Content: 5 Questions to Ask Before Starting Production
  • Why do Brands, Businesses, Marketers and Audiences Love Video in 2021? In a landscape where marketers only have a few seconds to grab an audience, video is a powerful storytelling tool. Video marketing has been growing for years, but 24 percent of those surveyed by Hubspot used video for the first time in 2020 and 69 percent of marketers who did not use video last year expect to do so in 2021. Emma outlined everything you need you know before spending a dime.

For more of the latest news and trends in marketing, subscribe to our monthly newsletter.