Good Monday morning. It’s April 20th. Wednesday is Earth Day. Parade magazine is featuring 50 Ideas from 50 States to mark the day. Congratulations to Heather McTeer Toney, Moms Clean Air Force’s Field Director, for her inclusion.

Reach out to George if you need to brainstorm about your organization doing new things in a digital way. We’ve already had these conversations with clients and friends. Now more than ever, we need to all work together and support each other. Just press REPLY in your email client to send a note.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,155 words, about a 4 minute read.

1. News to Know Now

a. The Amazon affiliate program is cutting commission rates for partners effective tomorrow. Those are the advertising fees paid to websites that you see with disclaimers about paid commissions if you buy products through their links. Rates for big ticket items like luxury beauty products, pet products, and furniture had the biggest percentage cuts, but cuts to more popular categories like Amazon Fresh groceries and books will have a much bigger effect. 

b. Advertising revenues are flattening across multiple product lines. Expedia reports that its $5 billion budgeted spend for calendar 2020 won’t even reach $1 billion. (CNBC)

c. YouTube announced a beta of Video Builder that targets small businesses without the resources to create videos from scratch. Templates have customizable layouts and colors using your own images and generate a 6 or 15 second video. (YouTube’s announcement)

Last week’s One Click Poll results
You’re (mostly) all one spacers. That might cause Ben Franklin’s printing press some dismay, but it’s a perfectly fine position in a world with laser printers. 

Don’t forget to make your voice heard this week on whether you think businesses in your local area are opening too fast, too slow, or about the right pace. The one click poll is at the end of this newsletter.

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Trackers

Covidly — my go-to.
Johns Hopkins — the one you see on the news.
Our World in Data – non profit based at Oxford. Maybe my new go-to.

Education Resources

Burger King Free Whopper for Schoolkids
James Dyson Foundation Challenge Cards for Kids
Google Donating 4,000 Chromebooks & Wifi in California
450 Ivy League Courses to Take Online for Free

Tech News

France Orders Amazon to Only Ship Essentials
Facebook Adds Covid-19 Templates for Small Businesses
YouTube Lifts Ban on Monetizing Covid-19 Videos
MIT Leading Academic Effort on Contact Tracing
Norwegian Telecom Wants Wifi Network Names Changed To Educate

Investor Mary Meeker’s annual internet trends report was replaced this year by a stripped down 29 page report addressing Covid-19 effects. Meeker, a former Wall Street executive, runs Bond Capital, a $1.2 billion firm whose investments include Nextdoor, Canva, Airbnb, and Hippo.

This year’s topics include federal spending, Zoom’s hypergrowth, and professional sports. Read the report here.

3. Search Engine Optimization News

Google Search now links to local testing sites when you are searching for relevant topics, reports 9 to 5 Google. There is also information from the CDC and easy map links so that people are referred to legitimate Covid-19 information. 

Google is also offering health care providers new options like the ability to show virtual care offerings, links for virtual appointments, and information about widely available virtual care platforms, including their pricing.

4. Also in the Spotlight — Washington Sues Facebook Again Over Political Ads

Washington has announced a lawsuit against Facebook for not maintaining required information about political advertisers. The state sued Google and Facebook in 2018 over violations of local campaign finance laws. Facebook settled that suit for $238,000.

As part of that agreement, Facebook voluntarily agreed to stop selling ads to political action committees although it would still do so for candidates. Since that time, the state reports that Facebook has sold more than $525,000 in advertising to more than 170 PACs. 

Read Attorney General Ferguson’s announcement.

5. Following Up: Zoom and the Dot Org Sale

The sale of the dot org domain registrarwe first told you about in December was postponed again after the parties received a last minute letter from California’s Attorney General informing them that the state has “serious concerns that cannot be overlooked.” (The Register)

We’ve also told you a lot about Zoom as it struggles while scaling up 20x growth in a single quarter. Bleeping Computer reported last week that up to 500,000 Zoom accounts and passwords were available for sale on the dark web. Their consultant was able to purchase account credentials at the rate of 500 per dollar. Yes, one dollar. Stop using the same password on multiple sites.

6. Debugging: 40 Million Coronavirus Warnings on Facebook

Facebook added warnings to 40 million pieces of Covid-19 misinformation people posted on its site. The company says that 95% of people do not click to read the misinformation when they see the warning. 

Read Facebook’s announcement here.

7. ProTip: Photopea

There is a new freemium (free with basic functions and ads, premium at $9/month) web-based image editor that has more features than almost any other and works with PSD, XD, and basic image files.

Check it out here.

8. Great Data: Providing Context

Risk scientist Jo Perla created plenty of discussion with this simple annotation to a now familiar Covid-19 slide. She’s not suggesting that the death rate is influenced only by something this simple, but she is arguing for the need for context in your data reporting. Dumping information helps no one. Analyzing information is very different.

9.  Screening Room: Knix Underwear Gets Real

10. Coffee Break: A Beary Good Citizen

Look, everyone’s having a hard time and is more stressed than usual. Be nice to each other and to yourselves. And if you’re of a mind, maybe join this lumbering fella in being a beary good citizen. 

Check out the 17 second video here.

Good Monday morning. It’s March 76th. 

Things change fast. At this point ten years ago, Blockbuster was still in business, Haiti was trying to recover from an earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people, and BP’s Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing eleven and creating the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

If that all seems long ago, take solace in knowing that we will one day view the COVID-19 novel coronavirus in the same way. Meanwhile, be kind to yourselves and to others.

Reach out to George if you need to brainstorm about your organization doing new things in a digital way. We’ve already had these conversations with clients and friends. Now more than ever, we need to all work together and support each other. Just press REPLY in your email client to send a note.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,595 words, about a 6 minute read.

Google news page for a viewer in France.

1. News to Know Now

a. Google must pay French publishers for using capsule views of their content in the Google News product, the French government ruled late last week. European officials have cracked down on Google and other American Big Tech companies over the past several years. Last year, Google was charged a $1.1 billion tax penalty and required to honor “right to be forgotten” removal requests from European consumers. Google said that it would comply with the decision and create content deals with EU publishers.

b. Facebook is rolling out a “Quiet Mode” for its mobile apps. Quiet Mode isan optional user setting that stops most notifications and displays a countdown timer if you try to access Facebook before the time limit you created. Yes, you can go around it, but it’s a circuit breaker that helps you pause long enough to distract yourself with something else. Read more here to learn how to configure it.

c. The one space people have won. Law professor Alan Chen posted to Twitter that Microsoft Word now defaults to a single space after each sentence as the Good Lord intended. If you press the spacebar twice after a period, Word will now reward you with an error. Or you could use Google Docs for free. And, sure, you can change Word’s settings too if you want.

Last week’s poll results:

Wowsa! Half of you are using Zoom for videoconferencing. The next most popular conferencing platform was Google Hangouts/Meet. We even got a vote for Facebook Messenger.

Don’t forget to make your voice heard this week on whether people should space once or twice after a sentence-ending period. The one click poll is at the end of this newsletter.

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Trackers

Covidly — my go-to.
Johns Hopkins — the one you see on the news.
Bing — much improved. Now includes color coding and graphs by U.S. county.
NY Times State Level Restrictions — hotels, driving, and restaurants rules.

Resources

Free NY Times for HS students and schools
Hoax and inaccurate news checklist video — BBC on Twitter
Fact check analysis of misinformation online — Reuters Institute at Oxford

Tech News

Apple & Google collaborate on contact tracing — Washington Post
NJ and FL using drones to police social distancing — Intelligencer
Facebook misinformation pages originating from Kosovo — Snopes
NASA sees exponential jump in malware attacks — Ars Technica

We suggest reading this summary of tweets posted by Steak-umm (yes, the meat company) about understanding all the data we’re seeing.

Bonus points: “we’re a frozen meat brand posting ads inevitably made to misdirect people and generate sales, so this is peak irony, but hey we live in a society so please make informed decisions to the best of your ability and don’t let anecdotes dictate your worldview OK” 

Read the whole thread.

3. Search Engine Optimization News

Google review functionality is slowly being restored.Search Engine Land reported Thursday that Google had quietly restored merchant review replies and that “new user reviews, new user photos, new short names, and Q&A will gradually return by country and business category.”

Google search engineer John Mueller also confirmed that Google sometimes creates its own snippet to describe a link in its search engine results. A website can propose that a certain snippet is used, but Google’s software may create its own.

One big reason that this happens is if a website doesn’t follow best practices for creating snippets. Google also may change the description if a person searches for something specific that is also described on the website’s page. You may have seen examples of this when a question and answer is  excerpted or when a video result is displayed and the video is cued to the answer in a Google result.

4. Also in the Spotlight — Delivery Slot Shortages Create Opportunity

Georgetown senior Adrian Hertel showed last week that necessity truly is the mother of invention. Hertel told CNBC that his parents have health issues and couldn’t get an Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods delivery slot.

Hertel wrote a program that uses a Macintosh’s web browser to constantly poll the site for delivery slots. There is a healthy debate at the download site over whether tools like this empower hoarders, but someone better give Mr. Hertel a job. It’s hard to find developers who think like marketers.

Read the CNBC story.

5. Following Up: Zoom

Zoom’s blessing and curse is that the world decided to make the software a de facto standard when hundreds of million of people went to work from home. We wrote last week about the many privacy, security, and scale challenges the company faces. 

Last week’s news was filled with announcements about organizations understandably abandoning ship and going to a competitor from Google, Microsoft, or other companies. The biggest names were New York City’s schools (which have their own issues) to Google (which owns a competitor).

Those systems and any others are vulnerable in their own ways. Zoom has gone from 10 million users in December to 200 million users in March. That explosive growth would make any platform an attractive target for hackers and other bad actors. 

Here are some useful Zoom tips from Elite Daily including this important one for paid accounts: “If you’re hosting a meeting with a paid Zoom account and choose to save the meeting transcripts, all participants will have access to the meeting transcripts … as well as any private messages between the hosts and other meeting members.”

If you are still concerned about Zoom, here is CNET on all of its security issues and the same for privacy and security via Tom’s Guide.

6. Debugging: Sextortion Emails

Good ol’ Sophos is here to remind us that a common extortion scheme involves an out-of-the-blue email that threatens you with the release of images of you looking at porn. The email kindly requests a few thousand bucks or you will face publication of side-by-side images of you and what was on your screen.

Read the sample emails or watch the video Sophos made regarding webcam recordings.

7. ProTip: Instagram Messages on PC

You’ve probably learned that Instagram in a web browser is very different from Instagram on its native mobile app. But now you can finally send Instagram direct messages from the web version.

Read Lifehacker’s for the news.

8. Great Data: Social Distancing by Area

Reuters published a great map animation that shows how well people followed social distancing guidelines on a county level from February forward. We’ve looked at animations before, but this is a county level map and features data from 7 million devices.

See it here.

10. Coffee Break: If High Street Shopping was like online shopping

Is it Christmas in April? 

Sadly, no.  But you have a wonderful opportunity to tag along with Lucy and BBC One since you’ve become quite the expert at online retail over the past weeks. 

I just want some bread rolls!

Hey, we know you love us too since you’re down here at the bottom of the newsletter.  Would you do us a favor and forward this to someone who you think will enjoy Spotlight like you do? Tell them they can sign up for free by clicking the silver button below.

Here are three ways that we can help you:

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3. If your organization needs help with search, social media, or advertising, have a look at what we do.

See you Monday.

Good Monday morning. It’s April 6th.

The picture below is from the Washington D.C. waterfront on Saturday afternoon and was posted by Facebook user Christie Nieri Troxell. The one below that is from a park authority in Ohio that told local visitors “…it is in no way possible to keep a good distance from others [in overcrowded parks].”

In the simplest possible terms, you need to stay home and not visit parks or restaurant areas. Make sure you have groceries and enough of any medication you take. Being able to work from home is a privilege, not a vacation. If this sounds preachy, it’s because the people in these photos are contributing to the spread of COVID-19. We all get to have a say when people jeopardize our lives. 

How serious is this? The Pope and other Christian faith leaders have canceled in-person gathered worship services through long past Easter. The punchline is funny but indicates how serious world leaders consider the pandemic. They certainly haven’t taken these actions so that people can line up outside Captain White’s for seafood,

Reach out to George if you need to brainstorm about your organization doing new things in a digital way. We’ve already had these conversations with clients and friends. Now more than ever, we need to all work together and support each other.

Today’s Spotlight is 1,729 words, about a 7 minute read.

1. News to Know Now

a. Apple bought weather app Dark Sky, one of my favorites. As part of the acquisition, the Android version of the app known for its hyperlocal forecasts shuts down on June 30.

b. Facebook rolled out a new desktop version of Messenger (iOS or Windows) that is reportedly much easier to use. The app includes free group calls. Here is Facebook’s announcement along with images.

Last week’s poll results: Nearly all of you are working from home, and that’s good! If you don’t do that every day, it’s a hard adjustment. Ask someone who has done so for years for any hints or tips they have developed.

2. COVID-19 Online Resources and News

Trackers

Covidly — my go-to
Johns Hopkins — the one you see on the news
Covid Tracking Project — great for state level data (hospital beds, tests, etc.)

Big Tech is having pandemic issues too although thankfully we’re doing this in 2020 instead of 1970. Can you imagine stay-at-home orders without the Internet, grocery delivery, and access to  darn near any movie or music ever released?

Although scientists knew that a pandemic was likely, our reliance on Big Tech for functions like video conferencing and grocery delivery underscores the pivotal role companies like Amazon and Google play in our nation’s infrastructure. Amazon’s vaunted Prime delivery times have regressed as it deprioritized anything other than essential items. The company simply can’t hire enough delivery drivers or warehouse staff to keep up with orders. 

Companies like Netflix and YouTube have had to scale back the quality of their streaming. Before the pandemic, Netflix accounted for 15% of global internet traffic. YouTube and Amazon Prime video represented another 15 percent or so, which means that streaming video for everyone could cause problems for other internet traffic.

Zoom is one of the established internet companies currently having its moment in the sun after spending nearly a decade as a regular ol’ video conference provider. Big tech is often gargantuan and can scale for any issues. Zoom is a $600 million company and lacks the financial resources of Microsoft or Google. And although analysts are generally pleased with the way that Zoom is addressing problems now cropping up as its user base more than doubles in only one month, the company has had a number of unfortunate stumbles.

There are significant Zoom vulnerabilities that previously allowed people to view private calls or to take over a group call. Those have mostly been addressed, but Zoom has become one of the top apps targeted by bad actors. We’ve compiled a list of articles about Zoom for you. For now, there’s enough attention and activity that allow us to say that Zoom is still an acceptable tool for small businesses, but we’ve also contacted many of our clients that use Zoom or similar programs to tell them about the threats and give them options, notably a new form of Skype called Skype Now that offers free video conferencing.

Smartlinks: Zoom during the Pandemic

A Feature on Zoom Secretly Displayed Data From People’s LinkedIn Profiles — NY Times
Zoom Sends Data to Facebook Even if You Don’t Have a Facebook App — Motherboard
FBI Issues Warning, NY Attorney General Makes Inquiry into Zoom — Gizmodo
Thousands of Zoom Video Calls Left Exposed on Open Web — Washington Post
Skype Unveils Free Meet Now Video Calls — Tom’s Guide

3. Search Engine Optimization News

This is worth repeating from last week. If you run a business that is temporarily closed, there are Google processes for you to follow that will help inform potential visitors and keep your search visibility intact for when you reopen. You can also use this to designate different operating hours and canceled events.

Here is a link to their official guidance. If you run a small business and need help with this, we’re happy to lend you a hand. Click the silver “Write George” button at the bottom.

The internet is abuzz about a lawsuit in a UK court that could compel Google to disclose part or all of its search engine ranking algorithms to a digital marketing firm. Search Engine Journal addresses the case, which was filed eight years ago and dates back as early as 2006. In short, Google provided the relevant documents to the court and the plaintiffs are now arguing that they want their expert to review the documents. My favorite tweet from their expert was made back in 2015 when he wrote and linked to an article about, “Google steals over 550 million clicks from #Wikipedia in 6 months, Jimmy Wales confirms.”

As you collaborate remotely with more people, there are also new Google Drive shortcuts to help simplify folder structure and sharing. 9 to 5 Google unpacks them. 

IMPORTANT for federal and state agencies that publish information about COVID-19. Google has created a special, secret group that will provide hands-on technical support for search engine optimization to ensure that your agency’s information is visible to as many searchers as possible. I can’t think of them or any other search company ever doing this. There is an application to complete and admission is on a case-by-case basis only. But if your agency publishes this information, you can use help from Google in optimizing that information to be disseminated. Here is last week’s announcement.

4. Also in the Spotlight — Coronavirus Advertising

Google and Twitter have reversed their positions and will allow advertising that includes information about the pandemic. Many advertisers told the companies that they wanted to advertise about their organization’s response to the pandemic. Google and Twitter previously considered “COVID-19” and “coronavirus” as prohibited words in advertisements.

Making false advertising claims, especially related to health, remains illegal no matter what company accepts money for advertising. In theory, that should mean that all advertising claims are completely accurate. In practice that means that you should double-check everything, especially about your health, and not from someone trying to sell you something.

5. Following Up: Amazon Bans Most Medical Mask Sales

Amazon has justifiably been criticized for allowing third parties to sell items for inflated prices to panicky buyers. The retail giant has now banned the public from purchasing N95 and surgical masks on its site. The company is also banning the public from buying “facial shields, surgical gowns and gloves, and large volume sanitizers.” Organizations with medical necessity for those items must complete a qualification process.

The story at Recode.

6. Debugging: There is No Phone Number to Track Stimulus Payments

I know that we shouldn’t have to say this, but apparently we do. Do not believe anyone who posts that there is a special telephone number to track your federal stimulus payment. While we’re on the subject, you do not receive a stimulus payment for completing the census either, but look, it’s only a few minutes, and it’s the law. 

Snopes debunking the phone number claim that it charitably attributes to April Fools’ Day.

7. ProTip: Use Amazon Echo as TV Speaker

We’re all spending a little more time at home and if that means a bigger crowd around your television, we have a how to for you that explains how an Amazon Echo device can buttress your television’s speakers.

Learn how at PCMag

8. Great Data: Where Americans Are Getting News

I’ll bet that you’re thinking that the CDC and NIH websites are not the top sources for U.S. adults seeking COVID-19 information, and if you are, congratulations for your correct guess. eMarketer is out with its timely Q1 Social Media Update along with some great data and visualizations. 

Most adults say that they’re getting their information about the novel coronavirus from TV or news websites. Social media was third, and those pesky federal agency websites were fourth.

Get all the data here. 

9.  Screening Room: Jack Daniels & Social Distancing

10. Coffee Break: Every Second

I’m a big fan of this Neal Agarwal site that shows you in non-pandemic times how often things occur online, at famous places like Disney, on Uber, or even at McDonalds.

Spend a few moments watching the counters grow.

Hey, we know you love us too since you’re down here at the bottom of the newsletter.  Would you do us a favor and forward this to someone who you think will enjoy Spotlight like you do? Tell them they can sign up for free.

Here are three ways that we can help you:

1. Get a free SEO audit on our website.

2  Have a simple, fact-based question about digital marketing? Reply & ask George for free.

3. If your organization needs help with search, social media, or advertising, have a look at what we do.

See you Monday.