COMING AT YOU THE WEEK OF 6.7.22
Happy Tuesday, compadres!
I’m curious what you think about this question below 👇 (click an emoji below to answer)
Does it make sense for certain organizations to forgo a sign of Pride Month support?
👍👎
This thought can lead to more questions, like:
- If a brand doesn’t show any signs of support does that indicate opposition to Pride Month?
- What do consumers think and feel when brands do or don’t do something to support?
- What about a brand that never does anything to acknowledge holidays or current events?
- What kind of support or celebration does the most to help the LGBTQ+ community?
If you have thoughts or experiences with this that can’t be boiled down to just a 👍🏻 or 👎🏻 response, hit reply and let’s talk about it.
Hayley
This week’s most important Marketing News
META IS CREATING NEW AD TYPE THAT ISN’T TARGETED USING PERSONAL USER INFO
Two ad buyers reported to Business Insider that Facebook is developing “Basic Ads” which may use engagement and video views (or something similar) to target ads, instead of targeting based on user data—like location, interests, etc.
GOOGLE ADS WON’T APPEAR ON SEARCH UNTIL AFTER THEY’VE BEEN REVIEWED
Ad keywords with an “under review” status won’t trigger your ads. The review process can take a day, so you’ll need to account for that extra review time when planning Google Ads campaigns.
GOOGLE RELEASED A SEARCH ADS AUTOMATION AND A KEYWORD MATCHING GUIDE FOR ADVERTISERS
The Search Ads Automation guide is meant to explain more about how the automation works and how advertisers can “steer it.” Through their Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, Google explained keyword matching has changed a lot. So the Keyword Matching guide is meant to bring more transparency to the process and give advice on how to structure accounts and more.
TIKTOK’S NEW AD PRODUCT, BRANDED MISSION, IS IN BETA TESTING
This feature lets brands create and share a content brief with the creator community who can then make videos based on the criteria. The creators can obviously benefit from the distribution and push of their content, plus they’re also eligible for payment. Any account ran by an adult with 1000+ followers can participate, so this could be a good strategy for new creators and smaller accounts.
 |
A few years ago, Google released Consent mode which basically allows you to stop collecting data in places like Google Analytics from users who have indicated they don’t want their info collected. This new feature, Behavioral modeling is meant to help compensate for that lack of user data some sites are experiencing.
The feature looks at users who are similar to those who have opted out of cookies and uses that “similar user’s” info to fill in the data gaps. So say User #1 opts out of personalization, and Google Analytics doesn’t know if they live in North America or Europe. Then, Google will look at other users who are similar, see that they live in Europe, and show you metrics—like 23% of your site traffic comes from Europe—based on the assumption that User #1 lives in Europe. Except, they’d be making guesses like that for many people, not just one user.
RUMORS OF AN APPLE SEARCH ENGINE ARE FLYING ABOUT
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) started yesterday (June 6) and goes until Friday (June 10). As usual, people have been guessing what exciting stuff will be announced, and a new search engine is one of the guesses we’ve heard.
The origin of the rumor is a tweet by Robert Scoble. He’s the kind of guy who rubs shoulders with the right people to know if this was likely. It sounds like he’s heard people say that Siri will need a new search engine one day, and he’s making an educated guess that Google will officially announce it this week. It wasn’t announced so far though. (I have more info on announcements from WWDC in the Interesting stuff section.👇👇👇)
RESOURCES
This guide will help you set up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for PPC.
This flowchart helps you make decisions after getting hit by a Google algorithm update.
This Ideal Day Mad Libs put me in a headspace where I could taste my future. And that made me willing to believe and plan for things that I, as an optimistic pessimist, often don’t let myself hope for. It was a good exercise if you need some self-alignment.
(Disclaimers: it’s a Typeform that never truly takes on a Mad Libs format (like a story you can read). That was sad for me. Also, there are something like 30 questions, which is a little long.)
HOW I REPLACED STOMACH-ULCER STRESS WITH SOUL-FILLING SYNERGY IN MY MOST IMPORTANT WORK RELATIONSHIP
Since working on Highrise, I’ve had a mentor. Like most mentors they’re someone with more experience than the mentee (me). And occasionally I can’t help but feel like they really should not be spending their time helping me. 😅 But they are! So, score. 💪
At the beginning, each mentorship meeting felt like getting up to sing a solo in my underwear—not to an audience but to one person. And that is OBVIOUSLY worse ‘cause it’s just the two of you and ugh. I was very truly sick to my stomach before every meeting. I epitomized the classic this is fine meme.
|
|
I figured, if I positioned the camera just right and showed the right pieces of the business, then on my Zoom calls, my mentor would never see the fires raging around me.
Don’t we all do that sometimes? In our meetings with managers or teammates we try to act all put-together and we hide the real struggles.
I think that I acted that way because I was worried they’d think less of me if they knew the truth. Like, how hard it was for me to prioritize the newsletter while taking care of my two-month-old baby. Or how little I really knew about growing a newsletter. Or how often I was frequently wrapping up portions of the email at 3:00am. 😬
Then a few weeks ago, I re-listened to Brene Brown’s famous TedTalk where she teaches about vulnerability and its role in gaining true human connection. The talk is beautiful, but I had never connected its principles to my worklife.
She teaches about connection and vulnerability, which feel like things that belong in marriage or family relationships. But not something that applies to a manager-employee relationship or between coworkers. At least that’s how it seemed to me.
But for some reason that day, Brene’s research felt applicable to my situation.
She reviewed the attributes of people who had an innate sense of worthiness. A couple of her observations about that group resonated with me.
- “They were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were.”
- “They had connection…as a result of authenticity.”
So as I prepped for another mentorship meeting, it was obvious what I needed help with: I needed a goal that would prioritize writing newsletter content. But all the goals I could think of were systems. Like, write for the first hour of work each day. And systems are good, but I wanted a metric that would track my results. And I couldn’t think of one.
But I really did not want to bring this up with my mentor because it felt like admitting that I was this giant mess, that I was failing at the MAIN thing this is all about—the freaking newsletter content!
I thought back to Brene’s observation, that the group of people “were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were.”
So I tried to let go of who I thought I should be, and I went to the meeting authentically. I asked for advice on the issue that I really needed help on. And that meeting had a synergy to it that none of the others ever had. And we came up with a great solution. My goal would be to have two months of content written in advance by the end of the quarter. We’ve had a bunch of other meetings like that since.
How are you holding on to what you should be, instead of being who you are?
Is your fear of authenticity or vulnerability holding you back from synergy and connection between you, your team, or your manager?
Here’s what I recommend:
1. Build trust with the people you work with
You can’t expect yourself to be wholly authentic until you trust the people around you. Take steps to building work relationships that can be valuable to you.
2. Talk to your people about what really matters
Prep well for meetings. Pump yourself up to say what needs to be said. Embrace the slightly painful reality of your authentic self. Trust that vulnerability fosters connection.
3. Believe that connection brings business results
Trust enables efficiency and motivation between employees, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Better goals, more creativity, less guesswork, more direct communication, higher energy levels can all come from trust-based work relationships.
I seriously hope you test out being more vulnerable and making the most out of your work relationships. It isn’t exactly an overnight fix, but trust the process!
INTERESTING STUFF
🤡 This article outlines the seven varieties of stupidity, and it proves that certain types of stupid are worse than others. I’m hoping this will come in handy one day when my husband points out something stupid I’ve done and I can tell him that even when I’m being stupid I use the high-caliber variety of stupidity.
📱 iPhone users will soon be able to mark texts unread and edit and “unsend” texts. There are also a bunch of other Apple updates from what’s been announced so far at WWDC, including updates to their Do not disturb/Focus feature that might help us stay in deep work mode even better.
LET’S GET VISUAL
