Highlights

• Google wants all website pages encrypted
• The Chrome browser will flag unsecure websites
• Facebook hiring 3,000 to monitor live video
• Why you should stop using public Wifi

Google flags website pages without encryption as “NOT SECURE” when they are visited using the Chrome browser and have a password or credit card field. Google announced Thursday that they will expand the program and call any unencrypted site that requires data to be entered as not secure. All sites visited in Chrome’s incognito mode will also be marked as not secure. Those two changes take effect in October. 

Google also began testing an option for consumers to send a text message to advertising home services businesses according to an article in The SEM Post. Their testing and ours showed that the service was not available on computers. That makes sense–you’ll text a business from your mobile device, not your computer.

We told you last week that digital advertising revenue will beat out television advertising revenue this year. We also said that the growth was due to Facebook and Google. An analysis in Recode two days later agreed that Facebook and Google are driving “nearly all growth” in global advertising. Recode includes a great chart by digital agency Zenith showing how the top 30 advertising companies now account for 44% of all ad revenue.

Facebook is using a lot of that advertising money to hire 3,000 new employees to monitor Facebook Live videos for violent content. Since making live video available to all users, Facebook has dealt with people streaming suicides, rapes, and murder. Our back of the envelope calculations put the cost of this initiative at an extra $200 million annually.

Organizations that use fake profiles to manage their online Facebook page may also run afoul of the company’s attempts to keep hoaxes and propaganda off the site. Facebook made its Information Operations handbook public this week and “fake profiles” are one of the company’s big targets. We’re big fans of Facebook’s Business Manager, which lets people use their personal logins without mixing their personal accounts with the organization account.

Of course, many on social media seemed to care more about a red swim suit this week than others. Sue explained it all to George who was flabbergasted that Sunny Co Clothing would would give EVERYONE a swim suit if they reposted a photo and tagged Sunny Co. Here’s the suit.

This sort of thing was a bad idea 10 years ago because people would simply repost the image for the free suit, then delete the image, and stop following the company. Given that Instagram now has 700 million members, the idea was terrible. But here’s the rest of the story via The Arizona Republic: the creative and execution were bad because the company is run by two University of Arizona seniors. They’re only honoring the first 50,000 reposts which could mean future problems for the startup. Giveaways, online contests, and sweepstakes are hard to do online if you don’t have training or support. 

We also learned about the data behind this week’s other social media viral piece: the video of talk show host Jimmy Kimmel telling the story of his baby’s birth and immediate heart emergency. Newsletter publisher Axios reported Wednesday that Kimmel’s Facebook post jumped from 1 million views to 14 million views, his Instagram posts doubled and his Twitter post was retweeted 26,000 times instead of the more typical “couple hundred”. Oh, and the video on YouTube was watched 7 million times in the first day. Your lesson here: no one–not even those who go viral more than once–has a secret recipe for going viral. You just ride the wave if you’re lucky enough to have it happen to you.

The best thing that we read all week–maybe in many weeks–is “Why You Really Need to Stop Using Public Wi-Fi” in the May 3 issue of the Harvard Business Review. It’s written for anyone to understand and is a four minute read. 

10 Second Takeaway: It’s official: More advertising money is being spent on digital (online) advertising than on television advertising. And more than half of the money on digital is being spent on mobile advertising. Rising tides lift all boats, but Google and Facebook have the lion’s share of revenue. Facebook’s growth is still exploding–reaching a level in 2016 that was about the same as 2014 and 2015 combined. Online ad revenue is where the majority of money is now spent in the U.S. 

Spotlight on Social Media

LinkedIn just crossed the 500 million member mark. About a quarter of those people are in the U.S. We know that there are fake profiles there and plenty of duplicates, but the milestone is significant. And now as a Microsoft unit, LinkedIn has the financial heft to make even bigger deals outside its traditional employment markets.

Look for more changes and more features to move to the paid section of LinkedIn now that Microsoft expects to recoup its $26 billion investment. This is an excellent time to check your profile now that the interface has changed.

Meanwhile, Facebook has announced that advertising sent to your site can now report back on actions on your website like “added to cart” or “purchased”. The enhanced reporting is in place now for new users and rolls out globally during May.

Spotlight on Digital Retail

Amazon’s earnings easily beat the Q1 forecast largely on the back of its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which now generates more than one billion dollars in revenue per month. Amazon is continuing to cut prices on its consumer and small business products, which it can afford to do because the AWS margins are huge. And that’s how you get free two day shipping.

Amazon’s free Giveaways product for small businesses is an example of Amazon’s outreach. Organizations can create an online sweepstakes for free. They simply choose and pay for a prize that Amazon sells. They can require a video be watched, a tweet be made, or even that an individual follows an account on Twitter or Amazon. The company won’t give prize sponsors a list of names, but the solution is as turnkey as any we’ve ever seen.

We’re also very impressed with improvements in Facebook’s Advertising Insights and new data in Google Shopping Insights. Talk with us or your agency to discover how you can learn more about your organization’s customers and prospects.

Spotlight on How Search Works by Google

So you think that you do a lot of website and marketing testing at your place? That’s what we thought, too, but Google shared this week that they ran more than 150,000 tests last year and made 1,653 changes to search.

That last number is critical. We remember Google announcing with pride that they had made 300 changes to search one year. 

What this means for your organization is that search will continue evolving all the time. The media and trade press pay attention to global changes, but a great search strategy for your organization begins with tracking how many people come to your website from search and what they do when they arrive. 

As Google wrote in their newly updated search manual, “For a typical query, there are thousands, even millions, of webpages with potentially relevant information.”

Digital Citizen: Privacy Reminder

The Circle, a thriller about social networks connecting everything, stars Emma Watson and Tom Hanks. The film debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival this week and reminds us that plenty of third party companies likely have access to your email, social media accounts, or even services like Dropbox.

The best article we’ve seen in a long time for dealing with this problem is at Lifehacker this week: “How to Secure Your Online Accounts…” Visit the link for instructions on dealing with many different accounts in your spring cleaning, including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and many more!

10 Second Takeaway: Personal assistants–also called bots, Siri, Google, or Alexa–proliferate beyond major companies, cars continue getting consumer data integrated into their computers, and Facebook’s moonshot programs now include plans for the hearing-impaired and typing without using a keyboard…or your voice. That’s far-fetched, but back in 2007, did you think self-driving cars would advance as fast as they have?  See: Blockbuster video, newspaper and book printers, cassette tape manufacturers, and typewriter makers for case studies on how fast our world can change. 

Spotlight on Google Search Future

Google continues focusing on two elements related to websites: speed and privacy.

We learned this week that more than half of all pages now shown on Google are encrypted. You’ll notice that their URLs have an https prefix instead of an http prefix.That’s doubled in 15 months according to an analysis by SEO Roundtable.

Google also doubled down on privacy by confirming that its Chrome browser will soon include an ad blocking feature. Little information has been made public since the Wall Street Journal broke the story. Chrome’s US marketshare is about 48%, but there are no details about whether Google ads will be exempt. Google online ad revenue was $60 billion in 2016. The company is refusing to comment about the initiative.

Organizations with websites have also been told for years that the prominence of their website is linked to its speed.

A famous Google video years ago said that e-commerce sites would experience user dissatisfaction if page loads took longer than 2 seconds. Usability experts claim that visitors will leave a site at 10 seconds unless there is an absolutely compelling reason to stay (looking at you, my bank). 

All of us want to use fast-loading websites and that knowledge combined with Google’s fanaticism about speed caused The Washington Post to stop accepting advertising from some networks that were loading too slow for Post digital staff. The Google search future looks to be volatile.

Read more: Encryption at SEO Roundtable, WSJ on Google Chrome (paywall), Digiday on Post

Our Take: Google announced that it might one day favor websites that used encryption but with more than half now encrypted, it is much more likely that websites that don’t encrypt their pages in the future will be penalized in some way. And Google has been insistent about speed for most of its existence. Your marketers and tech staff can – and should –  help your organization check your website’s speed with free tools from Google and add encryption inexpensively.

Spotlight on The Future

Mercedes Benz announced this week that all vehicles will now be equipped with Google Home and Amazon Alexa integration.

The integration isn’t seamless. You won’t be able to use Google or Amazon’s products without going through Mercedes’ in-car computer system. There are some fun benefits, though, including the ability to start your car with a voice command on either Google or Amazon or using their app.

Here is the current Mercedes commercial along with some famous AT&T commercials that seemed impossible when they were released 20 years ago.

Why yes, that was Tom Selleck’s voice back when he was still Magnum, P.I.

Facebook and Apple both create fantastic buzz around their annual conferences. Facebook’s F8 conference has long been required viewing for online marketers and developers. This year, the company announced moonshot programs that show that it is serious about being a multi-generational behemoth. Here is the farthest reaching project in Facebook’s own words:

We are working on a system that will let people type with their brains. Specifically, we have a goal of creating a silent speech system capable of typing 100 words per minute straight from your brain – that’s five times faster than you can type on a smartphone today.

Our Take: We work with clients on what is new and what is a current best practice for digital marketing. But many organizations–and marketers–that missed the smartphone explosion suffered for their miss. Blackberry and Kodak come to mind. We have no idea if Facebook will create a way to communicate without sound, but we’ll keep monitoring all of this, especially our new favorite: voice search. After all, people laughed at Amazon’s drone delivery concept just three years ago until Amazon, UPS, FedEx, and others began investing millions in the concept.

Spotlight on Federal Advertising Crackdown

The dress shown on the left was sent to 50 fashion bloggers in 2015 along with a payment ranging from $1,000 to $4,000 provided that the blogger posted a picture of themselves wearing the dress with certain links. Lord & Taylor, the company behind the campaign, settled a case brought by the FTC and its advertising is now monitored by the agency.

Warner Brothers did something similar with a video game and did not even allow their influencers to disclose any bugs in the game. And home security company ADT agreed to an FTC settlement regarding testimonials from security experts that the agency says were paid advertising.

The FTC is back with a warning for organizations that use online endorsements. 

You can read the 22 page PDF online or download it for reference.

Our Take: The government has been very clear for years. Internet communications made by companies connected to other companies require specific advertising disclosures. Your marketers need to be able to ensure your compliance. The link to the guide above is a start.