this_month_in_the_world_of_marketing_27_Feb_2025_restream
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm Pip from C more Digital Media. You're listening to Know How Marketing Lab podcast. This podcast brings together different experts in marketing from our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks Marketing Mixer. Each week we get on here and we talk about something, search marketing, like Google ads or SEO, social media marketing from Facebook to TikTok or website marketing.
If you're a marketer, aspiring marketer, a business owner or entrepreneur, this podcast for you, we're going to share the best SEO, search, social. And website strategies, we share tips and hacks, Google ad strategies, what's going on in the current markets. Each week we discuss something exciting and awesome in marketing.
Phelan: And we are live. It looks like. And again, it is that time of the month where we are going to be talking about this month in the world of marketing. Unfortunately, Pip and Rina are out today. So it's just going to be the [00:01:00] boys holding down the fort while we're doing this. And of course, yeah, exactly.
Whoop. And of course my name is Phelan with Seymour Digital Media. And I'm Greg with
Greg: Original72 Creative.
Phelan: Okay. Awesome. Do we want to start? Where do we want to start? We want to do Oh man, we can skip all over the place. Yeah. Let's just go crazy today. Yeah, for sure.
I am going to Why don't you get started talking about the WordPress stuff, and I'm going to go share this into the group.
Greg: Yeah, sure. One thing that has just come in the last week was WordCamp Asia was just on I think it was just end of last week or was it at the beginning of this week?
I can't remember. Anyways I didn't catch the live, but I caught the caught the streams on on YouTube after the fact. And there's been a couple or the one thing that's come out of WordCamp Asia People are at least I saw an article about, which maybe is a little bit [00:02:00] concerning. Maybe it's not, but one of the things is that someone, posed a question to Matt Mullenweg of where WordPress was going in the next.
And he didn't really have an answer. So now people are like feeling there's no direction to WordPress. And nothing will, nothing will be new or changed. There's no direction for the next five years. Which I don't think is completely the case. Obviously they're working on things, but maybe he got surprised with That question because they've been so consumed and focused on their implementation of The block builder Gutenberg and all of the phases of getting WordPress Done with that.
Obviously, they've had a rollout and huge development in that [00:03:00] process which has been their main focus for so long and That I think because they've been so consumed with that project and all of its phases is that they've not really identified or potentially don't have identified like the next big development thing for WordPress.
So I think it maybe seems. There's not much or no direction for it, but I think there probably is. And he might've just been surprised by that question.
Phelan: Yeah. I'll give it, I think I talked about this while we were prepping this, that Matt Mollowing is in an unenviable position because he's stuck with a tech stack that's 20 odd years old and he's having to maintain that and also look to the future and.
Try to map it out and cause he has to make changes that just basically don't break as few websites as possible. And I feel like he's, I also feel like WordPress is generally other than [00:04:00] the block builder is generally to my mind, or even more reactive to things that are going on in the WordPress or website development in general and new stuff that comes online.
And that they're like taking bits and bobs as they become stable and like implementing those. So I feel like. I wouldn't look to WordPress themselves to be the drivers of the big changes. I feel like big changes are going to happen elsewhere and then they're going to go, Oh, we can actually fit that in here and then implement it that way.
Like how there's the headless CMSs was not there their development, but they did take that because that made sense to them as a new tool that they could use.
So I feel like. I wouldn't look to WordPress for guidance. They're generally, I feel like a more reactive organization to events that are going on around them because there's a lot of, website development and also like a five year plan seems like insane to me.
Cause like you're like website development stuff is changing so rapidly all the time that five years would be way [00:05:00] too long to plan out. There's going to be so much that happens between in the course of one year, let alone. And
Greg: I know from past big WordCamps, like not long, maybe even the last ones, a couple of things that had come out of that were things like being able to import or export anything from any system.
So integrations into all systems where you want to come to WordPress, there will be a path to, to migrate. To if you want to leave WordPress and go somewhere else, there will be some type of path to export and go to that, like almost a universal import export option to go wherever you want.
That, that's a, and that's a big thing because people are constantly, choosing what would be right for them and their business and being, having a path that is easier. Then it is now to be able to [00:06:00] migrate a site from one platform to another platform. Would be amazing. I know I'm constantly battling.
How do I get this client's data from this system into their new WordPress site that we're doing right. It's a challenge. So it's not like there are not things identified, but I don't think there's anything to worry about that. WordPress has no direction.
Phelan: Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't. I'm less concerned about Wordpress not having a plan versus, I don't know, like some of Apple not having a plan for the next five years.
And it's you have infinite money and you have no plan with infinite money. Like that would be more concerning to me or their organizations known for being like the cutting edge. Whereas they're just generally not known for that. That's not their reputation. So like, why would you impose that on them?
Greg: Another WordPress item we can jump over quickly is a fallout between the relationship between Mullenweg and [00:07:00] Yoast, the Yoast I was wondering if you're going
Phelan: to tackle the name.
Greg: Yeah they, I guess he had come out with comments about there being a need for like leadership change at the top or at the head of WordPress, which Mullenweg felt backstabbed from by him.
About these comments. And so they're on the outs. Besides that one of the big things, as a result of the legal battles between what's the WordPress WordPress engine and and Matt Mullenweg in WordPress. There's now a class action suit that was filed by people who use WP Engine being affected.
So we'll be interested to see where that goes.
Phelan: Yeah, it's definitely I'd say that, it's, I mean it's all gonna get settled and probably out of court, and we're probably not gonna find out any of the details, and it's [00:08:00] probably just all gonna be. Slept under the rug and forgotten about really I suspected about two years time.
We wouldn't, we'll be like, Oh yeah, that got settled. And we're not going to hear anything more about it than that. That's my suspicion.
Greg: And then lastly, for WordPress WooCommerce rebranded nothing big, but they just changed, updated their look. So recent updates, if you've, if you're running WooCommerce as you're.
Ecom store, the latest update, you'll probably noticed a little bit of a rebrand, new logos and things like that. Their sites changed. Yeah, but that happened this month as well.
Phelan: Yeah. It's not like when they, what are they trying to change themselves to woo or whatever, some stupid name like that.
Greg: Yeah. They wanted to be known as woo which they are anyways, but they didn't need to change the domain to woo. com. That caused them a ton of pain with people finding them and [00:09:00]
Phelan: stuff like that. So stupid. WooCommerce does, that's a name that I can get my head around. It's what does it do?
It handles commerce. Like it's WordPress commerce. Like that does exactly what you need the brand name to do. So I don't know why they do this, but yeah, it's yeah, that's. Good to hear. And also so we got like Facebook is now going to be deleting your live videos after 30 days. They do have a tool, however, that you can download it or I think save it in some other tool, like your videos tab, something like that.
But they will be deleting them. So that's one thing to keep your eyes out. I'm going to guess that while we, I get a copy of this video anyway, so I don't, I'm not super stressed about that part, but yeah, it's just definitely something that's interesting that there
Greg: but it's the type of thing where the live, so now you're, you go live on Facebook and then it'll stay there for the 30 days or whatever, and then come down, if you actually want it to stay.
On your Facebook, you'll have to download it and then like actually post the video. [00:10:00]
Phelan: Which is, I don't get it myself of why they're doing this part, because it's not really, if they're trying to save money on server space, there's probably some better options to do. Like metaverse stuff is going to take up way more bandwidth than anything for the live videos, because it's just not as big a live video platform as it is like YouTube or Twitch.
Or I guess Twitch, really, because YouTube backed away from live video. And there's also the Google Business Profile. There's a review outage. It supposedly is over. If you do know the name of the person who left you the review and it still doesn't back up, you can reach out to Google Business Profile support.
And if you can give them the name of the person, then you have a chance of them actually going and salvaging it for you. But that's a big one that glitched out. We lost a few, nothing too serious. They came back, so I'm not too must over it, but it was definitely.
Greg: Did they ever mention what caused this at all?
Or,
Phelan: So I don't know [00:11:00] with Google, it's so hard because. The, there's a quote they have internally for any of their Google systems. If there's a one in a billion chance that happens every day for Google they've get all kinds of just weird stuff. And reviews, honestly, it's probably one of the worst maintained.
The actual the barrier to make sure that they're good reviews is really good. But they do, I've, we've lost so many over the years that just randomly you wake up and they're just gone and. When you've got like 60 plus, 70 plus reviews, you're not going to remember every person's name that's on the list.
And so it's really difficult to keep track of it. But
Greg: I've come to think of it now. I remember a customer talking to a customer and they had a 4. 9 rating on Google, got one four star review and then a couple, but a couple of additional five star reviews. But they went down to a 4. 8 overall because of getting one recent and they [00:12:00] we're talking like over 300 reviews so one four star should not bump them down from 4.
9 down to 4. 8 When the majority of them are like five star reviews. So now i'm thinking they must have also been affected By this where multiple reviews probably were removed, which would make more sense why all of a sudden their overall rating went down a point because they got one new for a four star review.
Phelan: Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised or the other option that comes to mind, I'm thinking about is like the way they programmed it. That if it does get one, that's lower than when they do the tabulations, they round down. I wonder if there's something like that cause you don't know how they're calculated on the back end to do that round up or round down.
So I just wonder if there's some sort of like weird programming glitch on the back end and it just that's close enough. Let's just round it down. And so it's [00:13:00] so hard to say what these ones are. And they obviously don't, they don't tell you anything because, why would you want to know anything about that?
Greg: And because they don't
Phelan: know. Yeah. And there's also like the thing of they don't want to reveal too much about the systems because then people who are hacking those systems to get, do. Get extra reviews that they're not supposed to you don't want to reveal too much about how the sausage is made because then it gives people a chance to do bad things, because, I get, but it's still frustrating to add it's an average person or I'm just like, I would like to know a little bit more about this, please.
And of course you'd get nothing. YouTube also has been doing a lot to with so that you can now boost your shorts. I'm going to guess this is within the app itself. So it's because there's also a new tab called promotions that's in there as well. So I don't know if the way it was worded in the article that I read about it is that it was in app.
And it's say I get a short and I'm just like, Oh, I really want to blow this one up. You can pay a [00:14:00] couple extra dollars right there. We do have a promotions tab now you do need a Google ads account to be connected with it. Cause you obviously have to pay for it somehow. But it does like audience targeting and a bunch of other stuff.
We've used it for a client to get new subscribers. And it worked exceedingly well, they had a 300 percent increase in subscribers or something crazy like that. So it is working overall so that. That's more things to look out for, because I know Google Ads is trying to get more out of the video space.
They're YouTube, and so demand gen has been really big. So demand gen is their response to the fact that Performance Max really sucks for getting leads. And so they created a new one called Demand Gen that's specifically for generation demand. And So far it's still early days.
So I can't be like, oh, it's wonderful or it's not but generally with the new toys They that they want you to play with if you do play with them you go further with your ads because they're gonna Obviously wait it [00:15:00] for the new toys so that people feel like I'm getting more out of it. Yeah.
Greg: Yeah
Phelan: Also, we've got a lot of stuff that's been rolling out with LinkedIn weirdly I know it's been a minute since I've advertised on LinkedIn, but they've been rolling out like a new conversions API to help you with better attribution.
They've got email metrics that came out. I think there's a new, so for anyone that publishes newsletter, because there's like a big component of like newsletters inside of it.
Greg: Do you think LinkedIn is still an untapped resource that is underused? People could find value in advertising.
Phelan: See, that's the thing.
Now that they're putting more effort behind the advertising, I feel like it could, but I've, it's been eight years since I did any ads on LinkedIn. And let's just say that the targeting was meager is the best way I could describe it. It was very wanting. But. Oh, [00:16:00] and aura is asking how did I get 300 percent more subscribers?
I don't know if that exact number but it was a huge increase of follow up with it. And it was through, if you go into your studio dot youtube. com and you go down to your videos, you'll have it'll say like lives, videos, shorts. And then the very last one on that is called promotions. And if you connected to an ads account, you could then actually.
Promote it from within your YouTube studio. Yeah. And Hamlet's also saying, yes, I'm going to guess that's to it being a viable channel. See LinkedIn has always gotten away with their organic being really good because they don't have the incentive to monetize every aspect of it like Facebook does.
Because there it's actually like it works for them to have organic grow really well, because that means more people go into the platform, which means that there's more data for them to then send to the sales navigator people who are recruiters, right? Because you can find out all this information because people are going [00:17:00] to be writing about what they do.
And so you can get a lot more info. And so it becomes more valuable to the recruiters because they have more insights as to the platform. For the people so it always had like actually a pretty positive incentive for them to do well. But I know that, there's only going to be so many recruiters, right?
And so as you're going to have to look for new growth, it was inevitable. They were going to start doing some sort of paid components to it
Greg: as well.
Phelan: I do know that they have Yeah, so Aura is saying LinkedIn advertising for newsletters sounds interesting. Yeah, it's a whole ecosystem that I haven't really been a part of.
I've read about it, but there's a whole you can almost Patreon you can have your articles behind a paywall so then people pay you as well and then they take a small percentage. So I know that there's stuff like that they're doing as well. And,
Greg: Speaking of that that reminds me Substack seems to be gaining traction.
Especially because of everything going on in the [00:18:00] social world. People leaving X and leaving. Other platforms, meta Substack is one of those places I'm seeing a lot of people flop to and it does, I don't need, know a ton about Substack, but it sounds a lot like you could put out content, newsletters and things that people actually subscribe to and pay for what you're producing.
Phelan: Yeah, Substack was actually the one I was thinking of. Patreon is more for podcasts is the bigger one on there, but Substack was started in 2015 and it was what you said, it was mostly their first round of people that they went after were journalists that were generally had a pretty big audience but basically there were limited by like editors and newsrooms.
Their first person is oh, I've got a blank on his name, damn it his name's Matt but he was a big journalist and he yeah, and so that was the big one, because I actually did reach out to him personally to get him on board, and so [00:19:00] that was a big one that, there's a lot of, Glenn Greenwald's another one, he was the guy that did the wiki wiki stuff with Edward Snowden.
So the, that kind of people that are independent journalists that had an audience, they were, that's who they went after at the start, but yeah, it's definitely grown to other people as well. So did you have
Greg: any other SEO related or can we move on to, should we move on to more, so the social stuff?
Phelan: I was just gonna, so I had one with, it's the SEO and kind of ads is that Google is rolling out the AI asset generation. And that's also going to include them being able to generate lifestyle imagery. So it's like your product in the context of somebody using it kind of thing. I'm always a little nervous about AI asset generation because I had a client that we accidentally had it turned on because it was back in the day where they're like, Oh, is it going to be on automatically or not?
And it wound up creating headlines about like Disney with. Like that we were working with Disney and they like, there was some vent people that put [00:20:00] on like imagery. But I was like, that feels like very risky for my client that like, that we would get sued. Cause I certainly would not have put Disney into one of my headlines mostly because I would have been flagged.
Greg: Yeah. That's interesting. And they put it right in the graphic as some type of a headline within the graphics.
Phelan: No, it was a headline, like the actual written component written headline you know how there's the headlines and descriptions they had yeah, they had written headlines.
And that was automatically
Greg: generated by the AI?
Phelan: Yeah. Of course you can do stuff like brand exclusion, but I feel like I shouldn't need to tell you not to put Disney into it.
Greg: It should automatically know what is copyrighted or not allowed to have in there. Yeah, exactly.
Phelan: And so that was, that always made me a little nervous about doing it.
Cause I'm sure first,
Greg: first gen the first release of whatever that feature is, it's going to be played with. Cause that sounds pretty obvious.
Phelan: Yeah. Yeah. [00:21:00] So I'm always a little wary of those tools because I had a pretty bad experience. So I'm I'm always. I'm just more of a, I'd like to be in control of this.
I don't like leaving it up to the black box to like just output like, Oh, you've got a bunch of conversions. I'm like, no, I want to know what converted, how did I'd like to know what's going on with it. So that always makes me wary before I jump in with a new tool like that.
Greg: Moving on to some of Reena's stuff for social, I'm seeing here there's this TikTok Doomsday Clock, which is basically the countdown of the 75 day Extension that the U S gave the app to, to continue running. We're halfway through that and no specific resolutions of come up.
Phelan: No, I know. One thing to also bear in mind with the TikTok is the number one investor in TikTok is actually in Trump's cabinet. So there's a strong likelihood it's going to get saved in [00:22:00] some capacity. Because the guy's in the hole, like 75 million some crazy, amount of money that he's invested with them.
So I'm going to assume that there's going to be some sort of solution that where that guy's not going to lose his
Greg: shirt. And despite despite that Rena's mentioned advertising on the platform, people are going all in ad spend is up 10%. Since it's returned something about video ad revenue surged almost 300 percent between April and January of 2025.
Yeah. Interesting stuff.
Phelan: Yeah. It's who knows how it's all going to shake out, especially as, a lot of these other platforms are still floundering, like Facebook is having a lot of issues right now. Still tech talk is the only one that's managed to still have a lot more growth in the field despite everything that's going on with them politically.
So it would be [00:23:00] interesting to see how it goes, like what, how it all shakes out cause it's going to have some sort of resolution. It's just, what does that look like? Maybe a continuous just extension of the deadline. But
Greg: I know. One of our final points here, was your comment going to be still TikTok or?
Phelan: Yeah, I was just going to say that I think that as well that the ad, ads, yeah, you talked about the ad spend has gone up like through the roof. And I know that's a big one that's happened because Shopify final really pushing their integration with TikTok. So that you can have your right in your ads or right in your ads direct links to a Shopify store.
And I think they even have the in app purchase. That was one that didn't exist up until a little while ago. Cause in China, the Chinese version actually has you can full check out everything inside of it. And so people will be like showing products and then you can just click at the bottom corner and then just buy the product directly on the, on their [00:24:00] the app itself.
You don't even have to go to a Shopify or anything.
Greg: Interesting.
Phelan: Yeah. So it's and so I think that's all regulated by your Shopify. So it has an integration. So you never actually leave the TikTok app, but the order gets sent over to your Shopify store and then you get a little notification.
It tells you it came from TikTok. Yeah. Do we really want to cover the last point?
Greg: Not really, but it's. Concerning yeah,
Phelan: It's certainly it's one that I was yes, it's very concerning, but it's a meta and X are allowing add things from a far right perspective is what I'm going to say.
So I don't trigger any sort of, yes, any specific words that people, but, yeah let's just say that it's about World War Two enthusiasts are the people that they're, you can advertise to about I don't want to even really read out the stuff. I just want to notify people that this is a concerning cause they had back down previously.
Like they had Facebook specifically had targeting that you [00:25:00] could have that in the past, and this was brought to light that. Very far content could be targeted and people that had those beliefs could also get targeted. And so I know that they had backed down from it before, so this is concerning that they're allowing it as well as
Greg: I would say extremist.
Yeah. Ads for extremist views. And ideology
Phelan: and
Greg: like
You can see the writing on the wall of other other advertising being allowed on the platforms for other extremist views.
Phelan: Yeah I'm going to, my, my guess is that they're probably going to be like someone's probably going to sue them over this. Cause it feels like you're making a decision that would, I just feel like this is going to make them liable in some capacity.
If you're enabling people to push content that, seeks to harm people, that feels like there's a liable case in there. Cause like the U S [00:26:00] is the land of free speech, but there are some hard limits and threatening people is definitely one of them. So my guess is that this is going to wind up in lawsuits just call it a hunch.
And but that actually brings us up to time. And I just want to say it was great. I know that we've had a We're having, it's been a, it's been a heck of a 2025 so far with just a lot of stuff going on personally. So I think it was good chatting with you, Greg.
Greg: Yeah. And just to note on our topic for next week, we hope that Rena's better and Pip is is back and they're able to do the live, but they are scheduled to do a, how to create social media calendar that works for you.
If you can next week, tune in for that.
Phelan: Yeah. Oh, and it was Matt Taibbi was the person I was thinking of as the journalist. That was the first Substack guy. Yes. And bye for now. Thanks [00:27:00] everyone.
