Office Hours - Small Group Session - Members Only - 5/10/2023

When: Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Time: 1-2pm EST
Where: Remote (Zoom)
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Let's talk strategy for how you are going to land that media hit, or score that sponsor. Bring your big ideas, visions, and successes that you don't think are possible.

If you have Media Contact needs, please also send those so that we may do a Deep Dive for you.

About TuneUp Office Hours

If you are a member of Tin Shingle, you can join Members-Only TuneUps on Wednesdays! These are open for members only, and and not open to the public. This is a safe space for Tin Shingle Members to come in with brainstorms to give and get feedback.

You can turn on your video camera to speak eye-to-eye, or just talk on the phone or through your computer speakers.

In this series, members of Tin Shingle with the Media Kit Membership can call in to workshop any need in their marketing campaign, including:

• Media Pitching: What a pitch to a certain media outlet should look like, and how it should read.

• Instagram: How to get sales and create PR opportunities from you posts.

• Facebook: How do you increase traffic from this platform?

• Website: The media will circle back to evaluate their website. What are they seeing, and is it clear?

• SEO: What's your game plan? Let's get one. You don't want to miss out on all that search traffic.

Next TuneUp: "8 Things I Learned After Deleting Facebook From My Phone (but not my life)"

When: Wednesday, April 17, 2019
Time: 12pm EST
Where: At your computer or on your phone.
Price: Free for all during this live broadcast.

It's happening. The deletion of Facebook apps from people’s phones - or from their lives entirely - as revelations continue to come out as to how invasive Facebook’s social tactics are. Even Lisa Paige from PopCrush Nights deleted Instagram for her phone for a day, and was so happy.

Tin Shingle’s owner Katie is a Digital Marketing Strategist, and has deleted Facebook Personal and Business apps from her phone, but still uses the platform for marketing.

Deleting the easy access revealed much about Facebook’s design, what’s working and not working with it, and how to reach the people who are still communicating with each other on the platform.

This isn't a TuneUp to slam Facebook, but to highlight the parts of it that you should pay attention to, in your broad marketing plans where time continues to shrink as more content grabs our attention. Namely:

Showing Up. Having a pulse on Facebook. People are checking out your brand page, and want to see life.

Shopping. Facebook is investing into the shopping game as buying via Instagram takes off. Instagram shopping is connected to your Facebook account. The only way to link to products on your website from your Instagram post is via Facebook's Ad Manager, so you can’t cut the cord just yet.

This TuneUp Will Cover:

• Design: What is hurting Facebook's design, and why your message may be getting buried.

• Facebook as a Creative Crutch. Are you reaching as many people as you think?

• Never Satisfied. There's a reason you're hooked.

• FOMO Fuels Everything

• When Facebook Goes Dark

• Facebook Can Still Track You, Despite Being Deleted From Phone

• So How Should You Use It For Marketing?

Google + (Plus) Shuts Down...Why This Matters, And The Huge Implications For Everyone

Google+ is/was Google’s social network for people. Google+ launched in 2011, and wasn’t the first social network that Google tried to create to compete with Facebook. Led by Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, the philosophy coming out from them back then about social media was: “we believe online sharing is broken,” as stated in this TechCruch article. This was back in 2011. Imagine what they think now. Super broken on many levels, from broken data security to human behavior. Both of these reasons contributing to the expedited and now immediate shutting down of Google+.

What Is Google+?

Google+ was a place where you could share articles, share photos, connect with people who were your friends or random people you’d never met. You could organize them by “Circles,” which was at first neat, but then became laborious as you kept organizing and micro-organizing your connections. You could chat with others, message, and just play like you would in a social network.

For SEO (search engine optimization) purposes, Google+ was great. Because it was a product of Google, the leaders of how SEO works, you had some faith that articles shared on Google+ would get higher treatment in search results. For instance, posting an article I wrote to Google+ would be part of my digital content strategy, because that post would show up in search results, thereby taking up space on Page 1 of Google search results to elbow out my competitors, especially if my actual article was already ranking highly. In fact, according to Google+ Support: “there's no way to make the content you share not searchable.” Hurray!

Google+ is much more than SEO, however. Google recognized that people like sharing documents, conversations and photos with each other, so they built a Google+ enterprise tool where companies can use it internally on private networks. The enterprise version of Google+ will continue to live.

What Happened? Why Is Google+ Shutting Down?

Two reasons: people just weren’t using it, and a data leak impacting 52.5 million people.

Despite myself knowing the high value of Google+, even I stopped using it years ago. Of all of the hundreds of articles I’ve ever written, I’d only shared/posted maybe 20 to my Google+ account. Google+ was just so clunky to use. Normal things to do, like sharing an article, or connecting with someone, was so hard to figure out how to do. The user experience of its ecosystem seemed discombobulated - disconnected - sliced and diced.

Developers at Google and these big social/data companies seem to spend most of their focus on creating new tools, and then creating more tools on top of those tools. They seem dedicate less time to studying and understanding how their users are actually using and interacting with their tools.

When Google first announced the shutting down Google+ (aka “sunsetting,” which is the sexy and friendly version of “shutting down”), they marked “poor usage” as a driving factor. They finally did a very deep dive in October 2018 into how their users used the tool, and found that most people actually didn’t.

But in that deep dive, Google also found a data leak. Impacting 52.5 million people. Eeps. That’s when Google announced that they were shutting down Google+, and would do it gradually, ending in August 2019.

However, they announced in December 2018 that they were speeding that up, and were starting everything now, and would end in April 2019, with some connections ending on March 7, 2019. 9to5Google laments the shutdown, and alerts people to different API failures that will begin happening if developers don’t update their tools to stop using Google+.

Is Google+ Widely Used In Places You Don’t See?

Creators at Google believe in sharing. That’s why the Google search engine was created in the first place. To share the world’s content. Google has also been known to respect its users and their privacy (I know - debatable as they have all of our data - but they’ve arguably been the most proactively protective about it). An “open source” market was born, which means that developers (i.e. people who code and make things work on the internet), could design things that would connect with Google+ and work with it. These are called APIs.

The ability for developers to connect into Google+ using an API to grab your data for some reason (like to log into something to make your life more convenient) was exposed. Google patched that, but got spooked, and have expedited the shutdown. There are probably more vulnerabilities, and for a tool that nobody is using, what’s the use in maintaining it. As they said here in their announcement.

What This Means For Buzz Building Business Owners

One less thing for you to do! You don’t need to share there, and you don’t need to know how it works anymore. Hurrah.

Why Google+ “Sunsetting” (aka Shutting Down) Is A Bummer

For the SEO reasons, and for the “let’s not depend on Facebook to share our information” reasons. If Google’s shutting down has a theme song, it would be Tiffany’s: “Could’ve Been.”

Why This Matters To People

Social media is run by Facebook and Twitter right now. It used to also be run by Instagram, but since those co-founders resigned in late 2018, implying too much meddling by Facebook, it’s down to Facebook and Twitter (Facebook owns Instagram). Oh right. Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitch, and a few others. But really, it’s just the first two.

The Facebook and Twitter founders approach life very differently. We have Jack Dorsey at the helm of Twitter, trying to keep it going and steering it in the turbulent sea of trolls and bad human behavior and data privacy. Jack gets very philosophical and thinks deeply about the social product and how it impacts people.

In the other corner, we have Mark Zuckerburg, who is nobody’s favorite, and maybe nobody’s friend despite his high friend count on Facebook, who is snarky and condescending when appearing before Congress and in any news interview, yet still remains relevant because people keep using Facebook.

There are other social networks, and each one will be tested by the trials that Google, Facebook and Twitter are currently enduring. People have asked: “Can’t someone just create a new social network so that we don’t need to use Facebook?” But can we wait for each of these new social networks that pop up to prove themselves and carve their belief system and actions to back that up?

Google was a big daddy that has flaws, but is a leader in (trying) to do right by its users. Google grew so big, working in so many different fields (healthcare, cars, phones), that they renamed to Alphabet (their website is abc.xyz - cute), and Google is a fraction of what they now offer to the world.

Google+ could have been a social network for people to turn to after Facebook burns down. But it just wasn’t designed visually very well, and there were no signs that that would have improved.

Could have been so beautiful…

Next Live Broadcast of TuneUp: SEO + Social

We’re in the middle of a “social migration,” as we’re calling it here at Tin Shingle. Behavior at social platforms like Facebook and Instagram are changing. Usage activity at Facebook is still high, but it’s an increasingly questionable place, both with data privacy, and being over-designed and over-stuffed with information, causing users to miss a message.

As reported by CNBC in March 2018: “Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg broke his silence Wednesday on the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that's plagued the social media giant in recent days and slashed stock value. ‘We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you,’ Zuckerberg said in a statement posted to his Facebook page.”

Instagram’s co-founders abruptly resigned from Facebook two weeks ago, just one week before Facebook announced another data breach. They had worked there for six years after the merger, which apparently is a long time in the world of acquisitions. Would Facebook ever pull the plug on their-self if they were too weighed down with data issues? It's a very unlikely scenario, but is implied by Mark's statement. Plus, Facebook has deleted websites they have purchased in the past (like that data storage website Drop.io that was pre-Dropbox and we stored lots of stuff there!).

So social is on shaky ground. We all want to connect, and we will, but what do you have in your own tool belt (hopefully) all of the time that you can control?

Your website.

And how are people finding it?

Googling stuff.

What are they going to find there?

Amazing content you’re going to put there, and lots of pictures.

What do people do after they Google things? They buy things and subscribe to newsletters. Your newsletters and your products and services.

That’s right. Good old fashioned SEO.

The three most important things you can be doing right now for your business is what we will be covering in this TuneUp - so go register for it right now:

• Making your website pretty and alive

• Sending newsletters to the people who subscribed and really do want to hear from you - frequently (they really do!!!)

• Posting to Instagram (yeah, do it, we’ll be watching to see if and how the user experience at Instagram changes, but so far, keep posting)

Join Katie live at 3pm EST to hear refreshing SEO Tips, Newsletter Tips, and how to be treating your social.

Private Training Workshop In Motion

Conducted a Private Training Workshop for these ladies yesterday, who have varying degrees of comfort online and with social media. This session covered a lots of Technical. A next session can indulge in Strategy.

Are you in need of Strategy and clever ideas? You can go pro with Tin Shingle with our Private Training Sessions. Booking on Monday’s only right now. Save your spot! This session was hosted in person in our Beacon, NY office, but can be condicted remotely via video conferencing. We make it easy.  www.tinshingle.com/private-training

First Response to Mark Zuckerberg's Testimoniy: Facebook's Problems Will Persist

Many thoughts are percolating after Mark Zuckerberg's historic first testimony yesterday before a House Committee. I'm preparing Tin Shingle's TuneUp on a Facebook Backup Plan for marketers and business owners, but below are my thoughts as first published to my own friends on Facebook, as I also prepare to scale way back on emotional moments I put into Facebook, and the photos of my family that I plan to remove:

Mark Zuckerberg’s Achilles Heel is that he thinks that data and the computing of that data can solve everything. He has a developer’s mind with a brain that works very much like a database, and that landscape is what he understands. When presented with the question today of if Facebook is a Tech company or a Publishing company, he picked Tech (I’m not even sure what “tech” means because all tech produces something outside of itself).

Facebook is a publishing company. People self-publish. There is no filter. No editor. Aside from a very few admins of groups, and still, selection is then up to their ethics and positions on censorship and filtering for good health.

Then, there are machine editors in the algorithms, and that circles back to data. Facebook is a publishing company. People publish to it largely uncensored. People become cannibals of their own minds by beating themselves up in their own minds, and beating each other up outwardly - but silently - semi-privately - on groups - or people’s pages or business pages. Facebook lets people become social cannibals, destroying each other. Even the good ones get inward and throw stones. Zuckerberg started Facebook as a place to rate people’s “hotness”. It started as a judgement zone. It remains so.

Businesses who are on to disseminate information are siphoned by Facebook and need to pay to play. But even those rules are skewed, and the people who want to see our businesses can’t when they want to. Unless they dig into Facebook settings to require that they see the information first. Same for friends and family.

I don’t see Facebook’s problems getting solved anytime soon because Zuckerberg is too database/computer driven, and not thoughtful enough. He has a responsibility as a publisher. He’s hands off, but he’s the enabler. Sheryl Sandberg is not empathetic enough to understand either. She learns with life experience, sadly, like the lesson she learned about bereavement leave when her husband passed. And Zuckerberg will too when his child gets addicted to Facebook or videos or to headlines the way all of us have. And then Zuckerberg will understand. But not until then. His choices, in the meantime, while well-meaning, are not ones I trust.

Don’t get me started on listening speakers. All I can tell you is - don’t let a talking speaker in your home. From any of them. Amazon. Facebook. Google. It’s an open listening device that can be tapped into, or more of your words sold for advertising and retargeting to market to you. Smart, machine-based marketing, but lazy marketing that trades on privacy currency.