Social listening has gained traction in 2020 due to the pandemic, but what is in store for 2021?
Chief Technology Officer Ryan Donovan of Vancouver-based social media management platform Hootsuite and Pierre-Loïc Assayag co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based influencer relationship management platform Traackr predict that 2021 will be a good year for social business.
The pandemic changed our focus on how we communicate. People relied on social media to stay connected while spending more time at home. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram became lifelines for connecting and maintaining relationships at work and with family.
The pandemic accelerated the move to digital across industries — especially in sales and marketing. Unfortunately, some brands will realize in 2021 they are already too late to the game.
Social commerce and influencer marketing
As budgets shrink and digital becomes more and more crowded, the divide between companies who invested early in social commerce and influencer marketing, and those who have just begun their journey will dramatically increase. In three to five years this will translate directly to market share for digitally-savvy businesses.
The brands that did not use social media to drive customer interactions and sales before the pandemic will be forced to digitize their operations.
Brands that already established a presence on social before the crisis will increase the use of analytics and reporting tools to make business decisions. This will result in brands forming stronger bonds with their customers.
Brand values over price
The most successful brands used social to connect with customers, particularly through one-on-one interactions. Consumers want to see the human element behind the brand and experience real, consistent, and authentic action. In 2021, consumers will increasingly prioritize brand values over price — increasing sales for brands.
Localize data in Europe
The EU-US privacy battle will force social networks to change. In 2020, the European Court of Justice deemed the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement as invalid, striking a major blow to social networks.
Regionalized networks will emerge
This decision will require substantive changes to social networks and how these platforms operate. Without having the legal right to collect and store data of European users in the US, social networks will be forced to either localize their data in Europe or abandon European markets altogether.
As privacy regulations tighten and the need for social platforms to engage with friends and customers remains, new regionalized networks will emerge to fill the connection gap.
Consumers are now taking steps to protect their personal data online. Instead of giving away an email address or phone number to connect with a brand, consumers prefer to interact with brands via messaging apps.
Research shows that over two in three (66%) consumers prefer to reach brands this way as they interact with their friends and family, more so than by phone or email.
Higher standards of social action
Social media management platforms continue to grow and follow the likes of Facebook by implementing direct messaging capabilities across applications. Businesses will have more meaningful conversations with their customers this way improving customer loyalty. Brands will be held to a higher standard of social action and responsibility.
Social commerce
Social commerce will take centre stage as in-person shopping becomes less viable. Brands will look toward digital with social commerce becoming a key sales channel as it connects customers to brands they trust. The trend is still on the rise, but will soon become a crowded space.
In 2020, social platforms made great strides to advance social commerce offerings during the pandemic. Facebook introduced Facebook Shops and rolled it out to Instagram and Facebook.
Data analysis
Snapchat announced its first shoppable show and Pinterest made it easier for users to find similar products on its platform. In 2021, brands will heavily invest in data analysis to understand the connection between social and sales metrics, further define their KPIs, and inform strategic decisions.
With more than half of the world’s population on social, platforms will focus on developing new features that make it easier for consumers to shop.
Purchases through Instagram or Facebook feed
Advancements in mobile payments will be critical for social commerce. In 2021, Apple Pay and Google Pay will enable consumers to make purchases through their Instagram or Facebook feed.
Digital crypto-currency
Social platforms will experiment with other payment methods like digital crypto-currency, but this nascent e-commerce technology will take place in the background.
Emulating TikTok
TikTok has marked the beginning of a new era by proving the social media platform giants can be challenged with fresh ideas. Starting in 2021, there will be a surge of platforms emulating TikTok with short-form video, low production content, and content-based algorithms for better virality.
With changes in how we communicate, shop, and greet one another, what has become clear is the need for brands to digitally adapt to the new way of working.
With over four billion people around the world using social media each month, social media has played a pivotal role in helping brands fill the void and build customer loyalty during the pandemic.
The challenge for brands is maintaining that loyalty as the world permanently shifts to the new commerce model.
Since his election to the Presidency, the added-value the Trump brand engenders has ‘ping-ponged’ according to his political postures.
Editor’s Note: Brand Keys has been tracking consumer sentiment and brand loyalty for the past 25 years and has compiled one of the most robust longitudinal views of brand performance ever assembled. One of the beauties of this kind of research is that its utility transcends branding and loyalty and can be applied (very nicely) to things like politics. To wit, today’s news:
Trump Brand Loses Added-Value in 75% of Categories Tracked
Consumers – particularly republicans – see Trump as “Entertainer-In-Chief”
21% of Americans would tune in to ‘Trump TV’
For 30 years Donald Trump was one of the most powerful consumer brands that Brand Keys, the global leader in brand loyalty and emotional engagement research, tracked. Since his election to the Presidency, the added-value the Trump name engenders has ‘ping-ponged’ according to his political postures.
The Trump Brand Took A Sharp Right And. . .
Since Trump made a sharp right turn away from consumer marketing to politics, consumers’ tribal and political bonds have made their effects felt. “The Trump brand lost efficacy in a number of consumer categories it once dominated,” noted Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys founder and president. “It’s difficult for one brand, even one as strong as Trump’s, to operate successfully in the consumer and political arenas simultaneously.”
The Trump “Human Brand” – Lift And Drop
Mr. Trump was designated a “Human Brand” in 1991 by Brand Keys, which coined the nomenclature to describe people that were the living embodiments of particular value sets, who were able to successfully and profitably transfer those values to products and services. If a Human Brand could do that, it increased a product’s perceived value and desirability. Percentages reported by Brand Keys indicate the value-add (or reduction) produced by, in this case, adding the Trump name to a product category or sector.
Four Categories Survive Trump Politics and MAGA Hats Don’t Count
Ultimately, labels and retailers abandoned the Trump brand, and categories – clothing, suits, ties, watches, and jewellery traditionally tracked – vanished. “MAGA hats and tee-shirts were self-classified by respondents as ‘political statements’ rather than traditional clothing,” noted Passikoff.
Four categories in which the Trump brand still exhibits Human Brand-efficacy includes TV/Entertainment, Golf & Country Clubs, Hotels, and Real Estate. In the current tracking wave, the Trump brand decreased its value-add in three of the four categories. Only TV/Entertainment was up.
Political Branding Effects
The most recent national Brand Keys survey, conducted October 19-27, 2020, included 1,812 self-identified Republicans, Democrats, and Independents drawn from the nine U.S. Census regions. It examined the four categories where the Trump brand still resonates. The only category where attaching the Trump name showed any lift was TV/Entertainment – but only among Republicans.
Tuning Into Trump
Four years ago, when a win for Hillary Clinton was assumed, the expected move for then- candidate Donald Trump was a Trump TV channel. His surprise victory changed that trajectory, but with President Trump soon to exit the White House speculation about launching a Trump cable network has reemerged.
Twenty-one percent (21%) of the total sample indicated a top-two box likelihood (definitely/probably) of watching some form of Trump TV, with political affiliation clearly and unexpectedly influencing likelihood-to-view:
Democrats: 7%
Independents: 15%
Republicans: 41%
“Trump’s efficacy as the ‘Entertainer-in-Chief’ has already been demonstrated. Cable news network ratings have hit record levels since he became a candidate,” noted Passikoff. “And remember Trump was already a TV star as the host of ‘The Apprentice.’”
Launching a cable network is problematic as consumers continue to shift away from pay TV subscriptions. “It would be more viable for Trump to acquire an existing channel that caters to his conservative followers or to sign on as a program host at an established network,” said Passikoff. “Trump’s tweets reveal he already believes he is personally responsible for Fox News’ dominance in the ratings, although it has been the most-watched cable news source since 2002.”
“A Trump TV show might help to revive faded categories,” observed Passikoff, “This current survey is exclusively an American respondent group but there’s a whole world out there.”
It seems that resolving advertising’s identity crisis is like negotiating a maze and advertisers have no idea what waits for them at the end of the labyrinth.
Sure, they have a vague idea of where things are headed in the scramble to evolve beyond cookies — the main workhorse for all things ad tech — but they’re unsure of the final destination.
“Advertisers are at this challenging point where they sort of know what’s coming in the identity resolution debate, but they don’t really know how and when it’s all going to play out,” said Lauren Fisher, vp of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.
It’s hard to be sure of any potential outcome when there are so many question marks over what comes after third-party cookies.
Google’s own work-in-progress proposals — known collectively as the ‘Privacy Sandbox’ project — to replace those cookies are being investigated by the Competition and Markets Authority in the U.K. to see whether it could concentrate even more ad spend into the tech giant.
Normally, Google’s loss would be the rest of the ad tech world’s gain. But the future looks just as blurry for ad tech vendors that have decided to replace cookies with hashed emails. Here, a site asks users to log in and may share their hashed emails with ad tech vendors. It sounds simple enough except for one problem: hashed emails could be — or have the potential to be — based on a consent model that seemingly decide that any user who logs into a publisher has agreed to be tracked by all companies in the large alliances and networks being assembled across the industry.
This sounds very similar to how cookies work. Granted, a hashed email isn’t technically personal identifiable information, but nevertheless it could be used in place of a cookie to give companies access to information on people who haven’t given their explicit consent for it to be shared.
If the browsers agree then it could mean those hashed email alternatives are on borrowed time. Both Google and Apple have been explicit in their attempts to stop someone’s information being leaked into the ad tech supply chain, whether it’s personally identifiable or not, without their consent. So far, however, neither browser has given much away.
And that’s just scratching the surface. Even if both companies do entertain hashed emails, it’s unlikely regulators in Europe will without a robust consent management framework in place. The challenge isn’t about getting the hashed email, it’s about making sure that the right ID and consent information within it is passed seamlessly across the ad tech supply chain in a privacy-compliant way. It sounds like an administrative nightmare.
With so much up in the air right now, advertisers are focused on what they do know — Google will remove cookies from its dominant browser sometime next year bar a major u-turn. Whatever advertisers’ beliefs are about how the industry has responded to this deadline, they’re slowly waking up to the idea that the answer — or at least part of it — rests on their ownership of first-party data in the absence of third-party data they’d usually get from cookies.
”I don’t know a single publisher or marketer that doesn’t have the “cookieless future” as a top priority right now,” said John Lee, corporate chief strategy officer at Merkle and president of the agency’s identity resolution platform Merkury. “The upcoming changes have gone from theoretical to very real and marketers are now starting to determine their plans to test various cookieless identity technologies [in 2021].”
That said, advertisers have been content to stick with what they know —Google.
Six in ten (64%) of ad buyers have used Google for identity resolution at some point over the last 12 months, per a survey of 302 marketers and agency execs conducted by Advertiser Perceptions. Still, marketers know better than to put all their eggs in the Google basket.
Most advertisers understand there won’t be one ID to rule them all, so are open to experimenting with multiple solutions from various companies: from building ID graphs based on their own data or focusing on data from publishers. Advertisers can’t afford to rest everything on one technology.
The upside to all this activity: innovation keeps coming. So much so that advertisers aren’t short of choices. In fact, advertisers and agencies work with at least four identity partners at any given time, while a third are open to moving to another, per Advertiser Perceptions. The downside to all this innovation: it’s a complex landscape that can be hard and expensive to navigate.
“There are a limited number of solutions that have a credible replacement [to the third-party cookie],” said Loch Rose, chief analytics officer at Epsilon, the data platform owner by Publicis Groupe.
It’s no surprise, then, that finding credible, trusted partners in the identity space is table stakes for advertisers.
“We’ve had as much inbound interest in the last five months as we have had over the last three years,” said Tasso Argyros, CEO of customer data platform ActionIQ. “The reason is people on both the brand and publisher sides are thinking a lot more about first-party data because third-party data is becoming less valuable for legacy and privacy reasons.”
Customer data platforms like ActionIQ are uniquely positioned to benefit from this trend. They were created to aggregate lots of data about a company’s customer into a detailed image that’s used as the basis for personalized ads across all channels. Furthermore, these ad tech companies are taking over from third-party data specialists like data management platforms.
First-party data is only valuable to a point on its own. It needs to be combined with data from companies like publishers and telcos in a privacy-safe way.
Enter data clean rooms. These solutions are pitched as a way for advertisers, publishers and tech companies to pull together their anonymized data into one safe platform in order to tackle cross-media measurement by matching the customer data with campaign data. Even an advertiser like TSB, a retail and commercial bank in the U.K., which has reams of first-party data, can only do such much with it before there’s not enough.
“How we use data and the protections around that are more important than ever, which is why working with trusted partners focused on the future model is key,” said Pete Markey, the outgoing CMO at TSB.
He cited the bank’s decision to use a data clean room provided by ad tech vendor Infosum as an example of this focus. The clean room will act as the conduit in which TSB combines its own data with data from radio broadcaster Global to identify audiences across its programmatic and digital outdoor inventory. TSB’s agency the7stars brokered the deal.
“I see more marketing moving in this direction where advertisers are using first-party data alongside lookalike audience data from media owners to reach people,” said Markey.
Livestream shopping is one of the hottest trends to emerge from a pandemic-scarred 2020, as retailers and brands embrace this virtual approach to engaging consumers. At Qurate Retail, we have a unique vantage point to observe this global phenomenon, as our HSN team invented live video shopping on TV about 40 years ago, and today our QVC and HSN brands form one of the world’s largest video commerce platforms, reaching 380 million homes. We’re excited to see so many companies embrace and elevate this powerful form of retailing.
As chair of the National Retail Federation (NRF), I’ve observed first-hand the remarkable resilience and innovative spirit of our industry in this difficult hour, with retailers deploying new shopping approaches in weeks or months that might have taken years in ordinary times. Livestream shopping—using live video to share products, answer questions, and close sales with customers who are joining remotely to watch, chat, and buy—is a natural outgrowth of the original TV-centred model and has been gradually gaining traction in recent years. But now, responding to shopping restrictions imposed by the pandemic, retailers and brands worldwide are racing to add live, interactive video experiences into their marketing mix.
(Qurate Retail and NRF members stand to benefit from the livestream shopping trend highlighted in this piece.)
The current livestream shopping craze has its roots in China in the mid-2010s, when influencers began using live video apps to take their fans with them as they traveled to boutiques in New York or Los Angeles, sharing and explaining products along the way. These virtual journeys offered viewers a glimpse of exotic locations with the option to discover and buy products that were not readily available in China.
China’s e-commerce giants, meanwhile, began offering live events via video, hosted by celebrities, with live chat and seamless purchasing. Chinese consumers loved it. On Singles Day 2019, Taobao’s sales event featured an eight-hour livestream with popular influencer Viya that attracted more than 43 million customers. In 2020, livestream shopping was projected to generate about $136 billion in revenue in China. Nonetheless, the financial viability of China’s approach remains a question mark, in part because of its reliance on celebrities to attract audiences, a costly approach that doesn’t always translate into brand loyalty and repeat purchasing.
In the U.S. and Europe, a variety of approaches are emerging. As in China, the leading model involves adding video commerce to popular e-commerce or social apps to tap their audiences and influencers. Instagram has added shopping capabilities throughout its apps, including Instagram Live. Facebook is developing native livestream shopping tools, with one headline announcing that “Facebook Live is the new QVC.” Walmart recently began partnering with TikTok to offer its products via livestream. Amazon launched Amazon Live, with an array of shoppable shows and a suite of tools that enable brands to create their own programming.
Other players are developing online marketplaces for livestream shopping or are helping retailers and brands use livestreams to engage audiences on their digital properties. Some are experimenting with more personalized livestreams that connect customers to shoppers or staff in-store or allow users to sell directly to each other.
This whirlwind of activity around livestream shopping reflects several megatrends. Digital media consumption is exploding, as new technologies make it easier than ever to create and share video-based experiences. Celebrities and social influencers are having a growing impact on purchase decisions. COVID-19 has pushed millions of consumers to increasingly interact with retailers and brands online, and many will likely continue to do so long after the pandemic is over.
As livestream shopping expands, it will continue to evolve, and the possibilities are dazzling. Perhaps artificial intelligence on social media will enable us to provide each customer with a fully individualized channel of live, interactive content, curated just for them. Maybe virtual reality will allow us to transport the customer to a front-row seat at a livestream fashion show, right next to a friendly host who is ready to answer questions and take an order.
In the near term, new entrants need to conquer more practical challenges, such as the rapidly rising cost of attracting online traffic to live shopping. Whether paying a high-profile celebrity or investing heavily in paid media, these marketing costs can quickly chew up budgets. New players must also keep an eye on economics. Those who fail to offer competitive prices, as well as to efficiently service customers and distribute products, will find success short-lived.
Companies jumping into livestreaming also need to learn that video shopping is about more than the latest technology or the influencer of the moment. Too many new players seem intent on flash over substance. Those who endure will understand that the key to success, as it was for the great emporiums of old, is building lasting relationships, customer by customer. The basic needs that have always defined retail haven’t changed. Even in the virtual world, it’s still about the power of human connection and the joy of discovery—wandering into your favourite shop, having interesting conversations, learning the stories behind the products, and getting inspired.
It’s fun to see this 40-year-old business model suddenly young again. The latest developments offer the potential to bring the best of physical shopping to today’s stay-at-home consumer, as long as we bring our humanity along with the technology.
Feature Image Credit: Livestream or video shopping, which has its roots in China, is becoming increasingly popular worldwide, writes Mike George.Qilai Shen—Getty Images
There are many entrepreneurs who wonder if having a marketing consultancy is truly necessary for their business. Many use the size of the company as an excuse for not giving importance to the marketing strategy, while others believe that with a couple of training courses, an internal person in the company will be able to develop, implement, and keep control of all the necessary marketing strategies. The truth is that neither reason is valid to rule out having the services of a marketing consultancy.
Beyond what many think, a marketing consultancy is very beneficial for the development and growth of a business, regardless of its size or the field in which it is dedicated, and as proof of this here are a series of benefits that your company will enjoy if you trust a good marketing consultancy.
Highly qualified and experienced staff
A marketing consultancy is characterized by having among its ranks highly qualified personnel with extensive experience in the market. This staff is usually specialized in each field of marketing, so if you hire the services of a specialized company, you will have a social media professional, an SEO professional, a copywriter, a professional working on your marketing strategy, a designer, and so on. You will have a specialist from each field with all their know-how working for you.
Up-to-date marketing news
Marketing is a very fluid discipline. Therefore, in order to be aware of all these changes, you should receive continuous training. However, if you use a marketing consultancy, it is important to make sure that you entrust the marketing of your business to a company that is aware of the latest developments in the field of marketing and that all this is applied to your company in order to obtain the best results.
360° campaigns
A marketing consultancy can offer a business a 360° service, that is, they take care of absolutely everything that has to do with the marketing of your company: market studies; analysis of existing opportunities; analysis of your company in relation to the market; design of the action plan adapted to the studies previously carried out; carrying out the proposed marketing actions and subsequent control of them, with the possibility of redoing the plan if the results are not as expected. You should consider looking at a company such as Winning By Design for these services.
Internationalization
The internationalization of companies is one of the growth strategies that has emerged with great force, thanks to globalization and the digitization of business models. It’s important that you familiarize yourself about the full potential of this strategy, it’s possible advantages and disadvantages, and how to apply it to your business. The internationalization of companies refers to the ability of a business to grow beyond its country of birth.
For this, the company generates a branch towards other markets in which it detects that its product or service is in demand and can be successful. Today’s globalized reality means that markets in different countries are interconnected. This, together with the democratization of digital tools, has meant that today the internationalization of companies of any size is easier than ever.
MarketWatch has highlighted these products and services because we think readers will find them useful. This content is independent of the MarketWatch newsroom and we may receive a commission if you buy products through links in this article.
Any marketing professional will agree, there’s not one skillset that you need to master—there are several—when it comes to staying relevant in 2021. Marketing requires business savvy, people skills, tech knowledge, and creative design, all of which can be developed through these 10 distinct course bundles.
If you’re looking to up your marketing game in 2021, here are the best courses that’ll help you do exactly that.
1. Graphic Design
Knowing Adobe’s tools inside and out is one of the most highly-valued skills one can possess in the creative digital space. If you’re looking to master Adobe in 2021, this Creative Cloud Suite certification bundle is an incredibly convenient and affordable way of doing so. In addition to a comprehensive Adobe Creative Cloud master class, this eight-course bundle features seven specific courses that focus on distinct areas of Adobe CC, such as using Adobe Spark, Premiere, Photoshop, and Lightroom.
Want a little taste of all of the above? If you’re a little bit behind when it comes to digital marketing savvy, this 11-course bundle will have you caught up to speed just in time for 2021. Through 22 hours of content on advertising, SEO, business branding, and much more, users will learn how to wield Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Zoom, Instagram, and even podcasting in order to grow their brands. For anyone who relies on online branding, this course is a must-buy for a more successful 2021.
Becoming a famous YouTuber could very well be on your 2021 to-do list. If so, this 50-hour course bundle will teach you how to reach millions of viewers in no time. Featuring highly-rated instructors like Benjamin Wilson, Chris Haroun, and Bryan Guerra, this 10-course bundle delves into what makes a YouTuber truly thrive through methods such as ranking highest in searches, how to utilize YouTube advertising, and how to grow your channel over time.
Many New Year’s resolutions involve notions of personal growth and becoming a better person. If you’re serious about doing that, this $34.99 course bundle is the perfect way to make that happen. This 10-course bundle features 13 hours of content on self-awareness, personality styles, and empathy, all of which allow you to develop emotional intelligence and ultimately become a better person. From courses on emotional intelligence to using emotional resilience to manage stress, this course is a mental refresher on how to live your best life in the year to come.
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Who doesn’t want to strengthen their brainpower in 2021? If you’re serious about continuing to grow and challenge your mind, this course bundle by Timothy Kenny features 14 hours of content on developing cognitive skills through problem-solving, metacognition, and critical thinking. A startup consultant and instructor, Timothy Kenny has taught at the Harvard Innovation lab, The Tufts University Entrepreneurs Society, General Assembly in Boston, and has been a featured teacher on Skillshare. This $21.99 four-course bundle is sure to start thinking differently in the new year.
With quarantines implemented all over North America, now is the time to work on public speaking and presentation skills from the comfort of your own computer. For just under $40, you can conquer any (virtual) stage or crowd through 51 hours of content on effective communication, presenting, and public speaking. These six courses include unique topics such as how to use storytelling as a public speaker and how to lead presentations at work. An investment in your career and future, this is a perfect bundle to buy for a better year.
Shopify remains a wonderful platform for online businesses to sell their wares, but learning the site’s ins and outs takes valuable time. For the interested Shopify seller, this $30 course bundle is a wise investment in a more lucrative 2021. This bundle features 30 hours of content covering SEO, dropshipping, design, and branding through six distinct courses. After this Shopify course, you’ll have the tools to take your business to the next level.
For certain business and communications professionals, email marketing is everything: it can be a fantastic way to reach customers and keep them engaged with your brand. This affordable seven-course bundle features 13 hours of content on topics such as email etiquette, B2B lead generation, email copywriting, and more. For email marketers, this is a must-buy to boost business success in 2021.
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for online businesses to gauge their growth and success—and this master class is available for just under $35 in time for the new year. This five-course bundle features 12 hours of content on Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, SEO, and more. You’ll be prepared to become Google Analytics certified just in time to cross it off your resolutions list.
If your business operates primarily online, then mastering online marketing should be at the top of your New Year’s resolutions list for 2021. That’s why this eight-course digital copywriting bundle is such a steal: for just under $40, you can learn how to become an advanced copywriter—one who can even freelance with their developed copywriting skills. You’ll also learn how to market on Facebook, ensuring that your effort and writing always reach the right audience with the right message.
A quick guide to spotting issues with privacy laws.
Privacy law is growing and evolving at a rapid pace. It can be overwhelming even for practitioners specializing in privacy to keep up with the changing requirements and even more challenging for law students or attorneys specializing in other areas of law. To help you identify which privacy laws apply, I ’ve come up with an alliterative privacy issue-spotting mechanism: “the four Ps of privacy.”
The “four Ps” also serve as a useful tool for practitioners and organizations to ensure they are conducting a complete evaluation of relevant privacy issues to learn whether privacy laws are implicated and determine the scope that privacy counsel should consider and apply. Evaluating the four Ps of privacy is also a process I recommend my law students to follow when attacking their final in my privacy law class.
The four Ps of privacy are people, places, platforms, and purposes. Each one is covered in more detail below.
People
With very limited exceptions, privacy laws only apply where human people—natural persons—are involved. Typically, these people must be identified or identifiable by some means on an individual level to implicate privacy laws. If people are not involved, privacy laws are not in play.
If it turns out people are involved, there is a two-pronged assessment within this “P.” The first assessment involves what type of people are within scope, both on their own and in relation to the entity collecting their personal information. Employees? Customers? Prospective employees or customers? Patients? Website visitors? Adults? Children?
Second, what categories of personal information are being collected from or about these people? Names? Social security numbers? Fingerprints? IP addresses? Different privacy obligations apply to different types of people and the categories of personal information processed. Those requirements change further depending on how the remaining Ps come into play.
Places
Geography, or “place,” plays a crucial role in the application of privacy laws. Privacy laws typically apply to residents of the jurisdiction where the privacy law has been passed. Still, some privacy laws cast a wider net and reach beyond their territorial borders. Much attention has been paid to privacy laws coming from places like California, Brazil, and Europe because of their broad potential geographic scope. Knowing the locations where the people involved live, work, and, potentially, travel will identify the geography-specific privacy laws that should be evaluated.
Platforms
The mechanisms that are used to collect, store, or share information can alter privacy obligations. There are several privacy laws that only govern certain platforms, such as websites, phones, cameras, Internet of Things devices, and vehicles. Additionally, the owners of certain platforms such as mobile app stores and social media networks have imposed specific privacy requirements on their users.
Purposes
Finally, the purposes for which information is being processed will round out the privacy identification process. Is the collected information being used for advertising? For treatment? For security purposes, such as to verify someone’s identity? The purposes of any personal information collection, use, and sharing, can trigger additional legal obligations.
Four Ps in Practice
The four Ps can help companies gauge overall privacy compliance or assess compliance obligations when they undertake new initiatives that implicate one or more of the four Ps. So, how does this work in practice? Say, for example, a brick-and-mortar retailer in Buffalo, New York, wants to set up a website to sell its merchandise and wants to start sending marketing emails to its customers. The company is based in New York, but its brick-and-mortar customers may be from other places, like Canada or Pennsylvania since the company is setting up a website that may sell merchandise to other jurisdictions. The people newly within the scope of this company’s potential privacy obligations are website visitors and customers. The platforms being added are a website and emails. Finally, the purposes of the website and emails are to facilitate e-commerce transactions and potentially to track individuals who access the website or open the emails and to market to them.
Going through the process of assessing the four Ps will set the company on the right path to identifying and evaluating the specific privacy laws it needs to consider as it undertakes new initiatives.
By Starr Drum
Starr Drum is a shareholder with Maynard Cooper & Gale in Birmingham, Alabama.
Emotional design can seep into every level, be it a logo or the offline and online packaging, of any brand. As human beings, we respond to humour, love, pain and a plethora of emotions.
Good design has two layers: aesthetics and functionality. However, great design happens to have an additional facet to it, empathy. The emotional element of designing is rarely thought about, be it on the part of marketeers or designers. Creating catchy looking collateral and content for brands thrives on a single, detestable word – VIRAL. Unfortunately, this ugly V word is often mistaken to be a tool that builds rooted connections with its users when it’s actually far from it.
With expanding channels that allow brands to connect with their user base, brand owners and marketeers currently face a challenge they had never envisioned. In order to ensure brand visibility and find a place in the target audience’s mind, they need to constantly create and push out fresh content aggressively in order to stay relevant. Be it videos or posters, brochures, infographics, reels or G.I.F’s, nothing seems ever enough! The brand owners straddle a thin line where on one hand, they need to have a social media presence that reflects what their brand stands. On the other hand, however, they don’t want to create brand saturation either. From the brand owner’s perspective, the question of how much brand content is enough brand content, is a tough nut to crack. As for the user, most of brand content often feels like stale leftovers. Having been recycled and reheated many a times, for the user, most of these brand content simply seems like a rehash of the latest viral trend – oh no, not this again!
User Experience designer, Aaron Walter, in his book ‘Designing for Emotion’, talks about how emotional experiences imprint on our long-term memories. Designs have the capability of creating experiences where the user feels like their interaction with the brand is grounded in shared human interest as opposed to the mechanical feeling of interacting with machines. Don Norman, the author of ‘Emotional Design,’ breaks down his approach to creative design into three stages: building the appearance of a design, perfecting the way it works and lastly amplifying the long-term impact. It is in these core basics where most brands fail. Brand owners, marketeers and design agencies these days are so busy creating as much content as quickly as possible that they forget how unsustainable this whole vicious cycle gets. If anything, we need to evaluate and evolve the manner in which we measure the impact of digital branding, stepping away from number of views and clicks. Being able to create designs that allow users to be introspective, become aware of unhealthy social patterns, uplift moods or create a call for action for social causes, are the kind of meaningful experiences that helps a product or a services crossover from being a brand to becoming a part and parcel of the community.
Emotional design can seep into every level, be it a logo or the offline and online packaging, of any brand. As human beings, we respond to humor, love, pain and a plethora of emotions. Hence, a design can reach its fullest potential by being, not merely functional but also emotionally stimulating. The #likeagirl campaign by Always won an Emmy, a Cannes Grand Prix award, and the Grand Clio award not because it wowed the panel with its CPC value. 2017’s App of the Year Calm, is a product that cracked emotional design to the T. Designing with emotion reinstates the awareness in the user that the brand is genuinely invested in their growth as opposed to treating them as mere numerical targets. By daring to go beyond numbers and projections, these well-designed campaigns have added substance to their brand identity.
Simply put, as a brand, you have to look at the concept of success in long term perspective. By rising above immediate buzz, it becomes critically important that each element of your brand, be it your website, an advertisement or an entire ad campaign is a building block to your brand’s identity as well as longevity. To build meaningful relationships and interactive communities through a brand, what one needs is not design that is VIRAL, but design that is actually HUMAN.
My warm New Year’s greetings to all local business owners and local SEOs reading my column today. Add to this my sincere sentiments of solidarity for what we went through together in 2020 — we won’t soon forget it, and our stories from the journey contain important teachings for our market and industry.
I often find that the best local SEO takeaways sprout from the real-world anecdotes of colleagues and friends, and you’ll find those here today along with my personal predictions for the year ahead. Let’s get learning!
Teachings from the real lives of local SEOs
In a year when we were physically distant from one another in unprecedented ways, I’ve found memorable lessons in how local business owners broke down barriers to keep communities connected. I asked four wonderful colleagues to share a personal anecdote with me about a local business they transacted with, both prior to and during the pandemic. As you read these brief stories, see if you can identify six common threads running through them.
“One of my favorite businesses that I have used before and during 2020 is Pete’s Diner. I first found out about them by driving by, but they have been in the community for decades.
Before the pandemic, my husband and I would have breakfast with his parents every Saturday at a different local restaurant. It became one of our regular breakfast spots because their food is great and it’s pretty close to our home. They also carried a hard-to-find, high-quality olive oil that we would buy in large quantities while we were there.
During the pandemic, we decided to do our best to continue to support local businesses. Pete’s really has adapted to the current climate by offering online ordering and delivery without raising prices significantly or compromising on the quality of their food. Moving into 2021, I recommend that local businesses continue to offer delivery and online ordering even after the pandemic is over. Use Google Posts to keep customers up to date on specials or new services and products.”
“I discovered my favourite Vietnamese pho restaurant three years ago. I was on the hunt for something that was close to my home, was family-run, and that had an amazing Vietnamese bone broth noodle soup that would remind me of my childhood (my family immigrated to Canada from Vietnam).
Like many SEOs do, I found it through Google Search. I always check Google reviews to see what a company’s online reputation is. The first time I stepped foot in their restaurant, they recognized that I was new. They took the time to explain their business and tell me their most popular dishes. They took the time to build a personal relationship and rapport with me by asking my name and sharing theirs. It felt like there was a real personal touch. And of course, the food was amazing, the service was quick, and they topped it all off with complimentary dessert. I was hooked!
I’d been going to this pho restaurant weekly — that is until the pandemic hit. I didn’t visit them for a little over three months when lockdown first went into effect. But when I did, I was so happy to see that they had implemented all of the necessary health precautions to make their customers and staff feel safe. I noticed a huge influx of takeout orders.
I think my best local marketing advice for 2021 would be to take care of your customers! Listen to them intently and go over and above what you typically would. Treat every single customer like they’re your family and they will feel the love! Don’t expect anything in return, and you will be rewarded when you least expect it!”
“There is a local cafe/coffee shop near me that I would frequent, especially for their homemade doughnut Fridays. The proximity of the location (two blocks away), the quality of the food, and the customer service made me a repeat customer.
The business was quick to offer delivery (even for two blocks away), which has been amazing — who doesn’t want Irish coffee and fresh doughnuts delivered to their door on a Friday morning? They’ve added other fun takeaway options, too, like bake-your-own cookie dough, meals, and a Thanksgiving pie and beer collab with the brewery down the street. Think outside the box and don’t be afraid to pivot. Focus on customer service and your customers will stay loyal.”
“Some might argue that Wegmans, the northeast grocery chain, has a cult following. It’s easy to understand why. I first discovered the store from my father. He raved about the way they had special baked goods, quality produce, and an assortment of branded products. I was living in New Jersey at the time, and I was hooked after my first visit. Maybe it was the takeout sandwiches, the fresh sushi, or the large and open layout of the store — and it didn’t hurt that they were about five minutes from my apartment at the time.
Since then, I’ve learned more about the brand and appreciate their philosophy: ‘Employees first, customers second.’ I want to go to a store that takes care of their employees. They’ve even invested $5 million dollars in employee scholarships. How cool is that?
In 2020, they adapted to the pandemic by being one of the first grocery stores to implement mask policies, glass splash guards, and social distancing. They increased their employees’ wages in March by $2.00, and had hand sanitizer at entrances very early on. If I had to give them one piece of local search marketing advice, I’d recommend utilizing Google Posts more frequently. Adding a post once every couple of months is better than nothing, but it’s such an opportunity to attract more customers to their grocery stores.”
Did you spot the commonalities in the four stories? When I distil them down into local SEO themes, here’s what I see:
1. Essential local businesses take pride of place
When I asked for a story about a favourite business, Amanda, John, Niki, and Garrett all chose an essential business — a restaurant or grocery store that fed them! Eating is the most fundamental of all activities, as recent times have highlighted for us all. One of my major takeaways from 2020 that I’ll be bringing with me into 2021 is that operating an essential business which fulfils the basic structural needs of a community is the wisest entrepreneurial strategy.
If you’re adjusting your business model and its inventory, opening a new business this year, or advising local entrepreneurs, learn to map community essentials and create a business plan that puts basics before luxuries.
2. Local business discovery is multi-channel
Getting found is the preliminary step to every local business transaction:
Amanda found a restaurant while driving
John looked at Google listings and reviews
Niki needed a spot in close proximity to her workplace
Garrett heard by word-of-mouth from a family member
Being there for the customer means being discoverable both online and offline, via vehicle, foot traffic, web-based local business platforms, and by word-of-mouth recommendations. Your visibility strategy for the year ahead needs to cover all these bases.
3. Local businesses can deliver multiple types of value
The local businesses you’re marketing have the best chance of success if you can unlock the secret of what patrons value most. These examples abound in our four anecdotes:
High quality — clearly, all of these foods are extra delicious!
Convenience — everyone wanted something nearby.
Brand affinity — John wants a family-owned business, Garret wants employees to be cared for, Niki likes businesses that partner up with one another, and Amanda likes a brand that maintains quality without raising prices too much.
Brand adaptability — all four brands made safety adjustments to keep serving the public.
This year, find out what your customers and potential customers value most, and make common cause with them.
4. Pandemic adaptations drive loyalty
The four businesses our contributors highlighted are successfully weathering an incredible storm via the praiseworthy changes they made to keep serving the public safely, like:
Implementing new sanitary policies
Implementing digital commerce
Offering home delivery
Doubling down on takeout service
Increasing employees’ wages
Trying new things, like meal kits
Forming new cross-sales partnerships with fellow businesses
Taking maximum safety precautions, delivering at the curb or the front door, facilitating online purchasing, and experimenting with new ideas are all must-haves for 2021.
5. There’s even more that good local brands can do
I asked our experts what they’d suggest if they could offer once piece of local SEO advice to their favourite businesses for 2021. They recommended:
Maintaining all new sales and service channels, even after the hoped-for end of COVID-19.
Making consistent use of Google Posts as a communications channel.
Listening intently to evolving customer needs.
Putting customer service at the centre of everything.
Making customers feel loved.
6. The most important local SEO factor is the human factor
These are the parts of the stories I like best, because they show businesses making us feel less alone, despite our necessary distancing.
Amanda found a place a family feels so welcome, they made it a regular multi-generational hangout.
Niki found a place that added a sense of fun to life with their creativity.
John found a place that not only served a beloved dish from childhood, but where the staff took the time to build a personal relationship with him.
Garrett found a place where he can feel good shopping because they take genuine care of their staff.
Philosopher Thích Nhất Hạnh might say that each of these businesses found a way to shatter the illusion of separateness, in the midst of a pandemic, by making each of these patrons feel like valued members of the community. Any local business you market in 2021 can definitely do the same.
My own local SEO predictions and tips for 2021
Here we go!
1. Your local business website will be more essential than in any previous year
It’s hard to believe that just three years ago, I felt compelled to publish a piece on why you still needed a website, pushing back on the narrative that the amount of zero-click-type SERPs was making websites irrelevant. Nobody can claim this in 2021, and recent stats from Moxtra’s Small Business Digital Resilience Report make the “why” of this clear. Consider:
66% of respondents say the pandemic made them more likely to do business with SMBs in the future (and I’ve seen higher numbers than this in other surveys).
But, 2020 saw 30% growth in consumers requiring that digital capabilities be present to facilitate transactions (think e-commerce and tele meetings).
And, 84% said if these capabilities were lacking, they’d consider looking elsewhere for a brand that could serve them online (84% is a huge number!).
Local digital sales are where it’s at in 2021, so finding the best possible e-commerce provider should be the top priority for all relevant brands. Don’t worry too much about zero-click SERPs this year. Yes, Google has its shopping engine and has even ramped up its “nearby” filter in 2020, but focus on pulling in every bit of traffic you can to your website’s own shopping cart this year. This goal will build stronger-than-ever bridges between local and organic SEO, so this is the time for local-focused agencies to double down on organic skills.
I’m also watching with interest the rise of medical devices and apps that monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and other vitals. There’s a telemedicine revolution going on, which should seep into other professional services that could improve customer convenience via secure tele meetings, any time face-to-face appointments aren’t essential.
Has anyone ever really enjoyed sitting for hours in a waiting room to speak to an accountant, a consultant, a banker? I don’t think so. In 2021, websites for professional service providers should be optimized to drive online bookings for as many remote meetings as possible.
2. The triumphant return of the milkman and the everything-delivery person!
What I find absolutely key to this story is that Alpenrose is managing delivery in-house. They aren’t outsourcing to a third party and losing something like one-third of their revenue. If a local business you’re marketing can deliver, it definitely should.
Further, I’d urge digital marketing agencies to have vital conversations with clients in Q1 about the problems inherent in outsourcing customer experience to a third party. As I’ve learned from both restaurateurs and grocers, it’s generally too costly and too risky to let another company get between you and your customers. This means that a key problem to solve in the year ahead is the employment and transportation of in-house drivers.
“Oyster man. Oyster manny-manny-manny!”
A vintage cookbook tells me this is the song residents of mid-century New Orleans heard each day as a seafood wagon came down their streets. When I look through and beyond 2021, my best inspiration comes from examining the past, with its bountiful produce trucks making rounds, and ladies coming onto porches to purvey gumbo file powder. Ask your elders for reminiscences to inspire 2021 opportunities, because everything old is becoming new again, and whenever I ask around, customers who have gotten a taste of home delivery want it to continue beyond the hoped-for end of the pandemic.
But here’s one problem I need help to solve: If I’m predicting the continued expansion of delivery, and I’m looking back in time, I see lots of households with somebody available to accept perishable orders. In June of 2020, 42% of the US workforce was working at home, but if and when we return to formal workplaces, who will be in situ to bring in the meat and dairy before they spoil?
Will the return of the milkman necessitate the return of the outdoor icebox, or at least some form of it, like a fridge on the porch, a cooler the driver knows to fill, an apartment complex cold case? Inventors, please speak up, because there’s just no way I’m going to let Amazon into my house.
3. My tossed salad of local search marketing predictions
So, solving for local digital sales and delivery are the two biggest stories I’m focused on in the year ahead, but here are my mixed greens of other developments I think we’ll see in the next twelve months:
1. Google’s Core Web Vitals is coming, and it will be felt on local business shores. But the truth is that — as recently as 2019 — one-third of small businesses still reported having no website at all (hence, nothing to optimize for Google’s latest initiatives). While local SERPs make it clear that it’s quite possible to rank a site-less local business in even moderately competitive packs and finders, 2020 turned the lack of a digital presence into a dire disadvantage for the smallest brands. Even a free website will be better than nothing in the year ahead.
2. Google will push harder on Google Messaging, and brands and agencies will need to decide whether to invite them into customer communications to this degree. If Google Messaging ever fully takes off, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google sunset Questions & Answers as a result.
3. Google’s purchase of Pointy should start to surface more clearly as key to their strategy for a local transactional future. I strongly believe Google’s greatest growth potential lies in facilitating local online shopping through a mapped interface, and I’m expecting their game plan for this to be more obvious by the end of 2021.
4. Reviews will continue to be absolutely central, but unless Google does something more about vetting the quality of reviews and Q&A responses from its Local Guides program, searcher experience will suffer. We won’t see a massive erosion of trust to threaten Google’s review dominance in 2021, but review spam and poor content will continue the confidence leak at a slow, aggravating trickle unless Google plugs it up.
5. If Apple launches its search engine this year, the local SEO industry’s necessary hyper-focus on Google could see some welcome variation. Moz Local already distributes to Apple Maps, so if you’re a customer, you’re ahead of the Apple game, but coverage of optimizing for Apple search will deserve your closest attention to be an early bird.
6. The rise of Nextdoor for local business visibility will hit a new high, and hopefully prompt the company to start developing more agency-friendly solutions. Nextdoor is the structured citation platform in which I’m most interested for the new year, and Moz Local now offers a top tier plan with a solution for agencies to help get all their clients onto Nextdoor (a function that’s absent from the platform’s own interface). Watch the Moz Blog for further coverage this year!
7. Local medical and personal service providers may need to expand hires (at least temporarily). Once a truly successful COVID-19 vaccine has been widely implemented, expect a glut of bookings from clients who have put off all kinds of appointments during lockdown. Now is the time to investigate good booking software and also evaluate Google’s options for this, because online reputation will be impacted by the ability to see clients in a timely manner once it’s safe to do so.
8. Public-brand affinity will set conscientious local businesses apart. Centering deep concern for whatever your local public cares about most will be increasingly important in the coming year. Whether through brand activism or allyship with major movements like Black Lives Matter or climate change addressal, or diligent support of local programs to alleviate poverty or increase diversity, equity, and inclusion, company reputations will become further tied to actions for the common good.
In summary
I’ll sum up by saying that there’s never been a tougher year than 2021 for making marketing predictions. After all, how many of us foresaw the harsh realities of 2020? But, as I look to the sunrise of a vaccine, and couple this with multiple polls indicating just how strongly the public wants to support local businesses, I think there’s both reason for optimism and genuine opportunity ahead.
2020 reminded us of just how interdependent we all are, for the basics of daily living and for human support, encouragement, and hope. Everyone benefits from inhabiting well-resourced, sustainable communities and if your brand or agency can help with this, the future belongs to you.
Apple’s game-changing new privacy move is great for users and bad for data collectors such as Facebook. And it could spark a serious new problem, according to reports.
After Apple announced iOS 14 last year, firms including Facebook were up in arms. Their issue—a game-changing new iPhone privacy feature which would essentially signal the end of the so-called identifier for advertisers (IDFA).
So much was the resistance to Apple’s new anti-tracking feature that the iPhone maker delayed it when it launched the rest of iOS 14 in September, to give developers more time to adjust.
But the feature is still on its way in an upcoming update of iOS 14, and it could mean app developers find new ways of tracking you, despite the fact it could get them thrown out of Apple’s iPhone App Store.
Developers say they will try to circumvent the iOS 14 privacy change
The confirmation comes after an article in Ars Technica, which quotes several app developers who say they will try to circumvent the iOS 14 privacy change. Device fingerprinting—which correlates factors such as a device’s operating system, browser version and type, language and IP address to identify it—is one method being considered, a mobile games developer told the site.
This goes against Apple’s guidelines, which state in answer to the question “Can I fingerprint or use signals from the device to try to identify the device or user?”:
“No. Per the Developer program License Agreement, you may not derive data from a device for the purpose of uniquely identifying it.”
Worryingly, the article states that some developers plan to use methods such as this even if Apple users deny access to the IDFA.
It comes as Facebook finally yielded to Apple’s anti-tracking changes, saying people have no choice but to follow the new rules. Facebook placed full size adverts in several newspapers last year criticising the iPhone maker.
Apple app developers—”between a rock and a hard place”
In some ways, it’s understandable that developers are desperately looking for new ways to recoup lost revenue in the lucrative iPhone advertising market. “App developers are stuck between a rock and a hard place,” says Jake Moore, cybersecurity specialist at ESET.
“They need to make an app functional and secure and yet there is always a major push to make such apps track. IDFA tracking without explicit user consent has been the backbone of modern-day advertising and is worth billions of dollars so when privacy updates are instructed by Apple, it is inevitable that some developers will seek to avoid these new measures.”
Sean Wright, application security SME lead at Immersive Labs says because developers rely on advertising as a means of generating revenue from their applications, it’s no surprise the proposed changes from Apple “aren’t too popular.”
What Apple users should do
Bad practices such as fingerprinting are against Apple’s App Store rules, but Wright says it’s important how the iPhone maker enforces this. “It’s a question if this will be something they can enforce via technical controls or instead rely on users reporting violations.”
So what does this mean for iPhone users? Wright says the best way to avoid device fingerprinting is to have similar settings to other users, so it’s hard to identify your device. Of course, this isn’t easy to do, so Wright also advises Apple users to look to paid alternatives instead, “since they would not tend to rely on advertising for revenue.”
As Apple’s anti-tracking changes draw near, iPhone need to be prepared. One thing you can do now is use my guide to turning off the ability for apps to track in your settings. More generally, make sure you trust the developers who make your apps. Use the app privacy labels and manage your permissions carefully.
In the meantime, why not have an app clean up on your iPhone, deleting anything you don’t use. When you download new apps, paid for services may be safer. After all, nothing is ever truly free.
Feature Image Credit: Apple’s game-changing new privacy move is great for users and bad for data collectors such as Facebook. And it could spark a serious new problem, according to reports. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
I’m a freelance cybersecurity journalist with over a decade’s experience writing news, reviews and features. I report and analyze breaking cybersecurity and privacy stories with a particular interest in cyber warfare, application security and data misuse by the big tech companies. In addition to Forbes, you can find my work in Wired, The Times, The Economist and The Guardian. Contact me at [email protected].
