Helloo

This is a packed email. So, let’s just get to it.

🫡Hayley

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​GOOGLE BARD CAN PROVIDE RELEVANT LOCAL RESULTS NOW​

Google’s AI chatbot can now use your location to provide local results.

​GOOGLE’S TURNING OFF THIRD-PARTY COOKIES FOR 1% OF CHROME USERS NEXT YEAR​

1% of Chrome users won’t have third-party cookie access starting the beginning of 2024—Jan 1.

​INSTAGRAM WORKS TO RELEASE THEIR TWITTER COMPETITOR​

Meta’s new text-based app might be released before the end of Summer.

​GOOGLE’S GMAIL VERIFICATION CHECKMARK GOES AWRY​

Scammers have already begun hijacking the blue checkmark Google recently released to help identify verified brands in Gmail. I probably shouldn’t take this lightly but this cracks me up. Here’s the thing though, I feel like a lot of tools that platforms give to help signal trusted people and brands just makes people turn that stuff into white noise. So I don’t feel super invested in this stuff working anyway.

​GOOGLE CLARIFIES SHOPPING POLICIES, REQUIREMENTS, AND RANKING​

They made updates to a bunch of documents (6) to explain:

• More details on shopping ad and free listing policies and how they’re enforced
• Reasons why your shopping and product ads might not be served and what to do if they aren’t
• How Google Shopping ranking and personalization works

​MICROSOFT INTRODUCES A NEW FEATURE UNIVERSAL EVENT TRACKING INSIGHTS ​

Microsoft uses Universal event tracking (UET) tags to help advertisers collect important data about site visitors and their actions on their site. The UET Insights feature will provide more details on your website’s performance that could help hone your ad targeting (or retargeting) and detect fraud.

​BING CHAT UPDATES CHAT TURN TOTAL AND PLANS TO PROVIDE ACCESS IN OTHER BROWSERS​

As Bing continues to work toward more adoption and use, it increase the amount of “turns” you can take with Bing’s AI chatbot. Before you could take 20 turns in one chat, now you have 30. They also continue to work toward providing Bing Chat in Browsers like Chrome and Safari. But they’ve been saying that for a little while and no definite timeline has been shared.

​ProWritingAid​
​This is a Grammarly alternative I’ve been testing out. In general, I don’t love tools like Grammarly because it seems like they just try to suck out all the personality in someone’s writing. It wants me to remove most of the fun in my writing (imo).

*But* I think ProWritingAid is pretty cool for a few reasons:

• It has a bunch of free features. It offers a lot more than Grammarly in the free version.
• It shows scores on writing areas like jargon, style, sentence variety, etc.
• You can personalize your edit setting to say what kind of writing the piece is. For instance, you can specify that it’s a business piece, specifically a sales email.

So if you want some editing help, check ‘em out.

Let me know if there are tools you want me to try out or tools you think other marketers would love.

INSTAGRAM SHARES MORE ABOUT HOW THEY RANK CONTENT​

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, shared the factors they use to order content in the Instagram Feed, Stories, Reels, and Explore. The article also includes how t

o check if your business account is eligible to have posts appear as recommended content in people’s feeds.

​SCREENSHOTS OF A BUNCH OF GOOGLE’S SEARCH GENERATIVE EXPERIENCE RESULTS​

If you’re like me and haven’t received access to Google SGE testing yet, then you might like all these screenshots of what different queries are showing.

​TIKTOK’S 2023 HOLIDAY ADVERTISING GUIDE​

TikTok just released this guy for those of you who are planning early.

​STUDY COMPARES TIKTOK VS. REELS VS. SHORTS​

This study took a look at Tiktok videos, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts between 2021 and 2023 to see what had the highest engagement, most views, and most videos posted. TikTok had the highest engagement, but this other article argues TikTok is declining.

I have long been fixated on the concept of utility, as in “the state of being useful, profitable, or beneficial.” And I recently came across an article by Paul Graham. Here’s a quote from that, but I replace “essay” with “content marketing.”

What should content marketing be? Many people would say “persuasive.” That’s what a lot of us were taught content marketing should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that content marketing should be useful.

Yes! I WANT TO GET MY EYES ON USEFUL CONTENT. And I want to create useful stuff. I bet you do too.

But persuasion ends up as the focus of content marketing all the time. We create content in order to persuade our audience to complete a goal—like getting new email subscribers, driving traffic to the demo page, etc.

And while persuasive and useful aren’t mutually exclusive, your audience needs to first and foremost feel served by the content you present to them. That’s how you end up in the pleasant thoughts of lovely people when it’s time to buy a gift or to recommend a new software to their boss.

There is SO MUCH to creating useful content. Today, let’s talk about concocting content with the perfect level of specificity. That is very useful to your audience.

For instance, I think about this a lot when writing to you guys about technical updates. Take an example from today’s news section. I found an article titled: Introducing new website insights for Universal Event Tracking Tag

I could have read the article and written a summary like this:

Microsoft is adding a new Insights feature to their UET tag system. This will be cool because it’ll come with a dashboard with these new Insights on your website performance.

Here’s what I actually wrote:

Microsoft uses Universal event tracking (UET) tags. Tagging help advertisers collect important data about site visitors and their actions on the site. The UET Insights feature will provide more details on your website’s performance that could help hone your ad targeting (or retargeting) and detect fraud.

Things I do to add useful specificity:

1. Provide context. I briefly mentioned what UET tags are. That gives context, it sets the stage for the actual update. Giving context often requires less work and less word count than you might think and it helps your audience to feel smart. They don’t feel like they’re missing something.
2. Provide definitions and descriptions. In that first, hypothetical description, I mention how the dashboard will give insights on website performance. But what do I mean by website performance? My audience is smart, they could guess and figure it out. But people don’t often want to put in that kind of effort. Small moments of ambiguity can distract people and make them give up on a piece of writing.
3. Give examples. Examples are a great way to teach, we all know that. But sometimes we hesitate to make our piece longer or “bog it down” with more content. I’d argue that you can include examples with less words than you’d expect. My second example is 16 more words than the first. And it includes examples, descriptions, and context.

Have fun getting specific!

Watch out for AI hallucinations!

Hallucinations happen when AI chatbots present fabricated information as facts.

Most of us responsible internet users have known to watch out for this. But it isn’t easy to recognize when these “lies” happen. (I’m also just tickled that we’re calling these instances hallucinations.)

OpenAI has been exploring why hallucinations happen and options for preventing it.

In a report by OpenAI, authors write, “These hallucinations are particularly problematic in domains that require multi-step reasoning, since a single logical error is enough to derail a much larger solution.”

Experts are exploring a technique called process supervision to prevent hallucinations in multi-step reasoning scenarios.

This would “train AI models to reward themselves for each individual, correct step of reasoning when they’re arriving at an answer, instead of just rewarding a correct final conclusion.”

This isn’t being used or applied to ChatGPT now, but might be a solution for the future. ​
​
​I used this CNBC article OpenAI is pursuing a new way to fight A.I. ‘hallucinations’ to write today’s AI Corner discussion.

​🦁 EVERY WINNING CAMPAIGN FROM CANNES LION’S​

​🖼️ ADOBE IS ADDING AI IMAGE GENERATOR TO PHOTOSHOP​

​⛅ TWITTER ALTERNATIVE BLUESKY HITS 100K MEMBERS BEFORE EXITING BETA​

​🚗 SELF-DRIVING CARS WILL BE AVAILABLE ON UBER’S APP, STARTING IN PHOENIX​

​✍️ EU AND US LAWMAKERS MOVE TO DRAFT AI CODE OF CONDUCT FAST​

​🔍 GOOGLE’S AI-POWERED SEARCH EXPERIENCE IS WAY TOO SLOW AND NOT REALLY PERSONALIZED​

​📺 25% OF NEW NETFLIX SUBSCRIBERS ARE SIGNING UP FOR AD-SUPPORTED TIER​

​💰 REDDIT WILL CHARGE HEFTY FEES TO THE MANY THIRD-PARTY APPS THAT ACCESS ITS DATA

Some of the links in my newsletters are affiliate links. So sometimes I get monies (aka dollary doos, aka sweet sweet dough) when you buy or sign up for some of the stuff I mention—at no extra cost to you.