In The Headlights: August 28, 2019 Issue - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

I was reading a blog post this morning in preparing this issue of the newsletter, and said post was dispensing SEO advice that was literally 10 years old. I was astonished, even though the post itself was only hours old, how dated the advice was, how behind the times the author was.

Some advice is timeless, withstanding changes in societies and culture; the Golden Rule has held up in nearly every religion and faith in human history. But when it comes to digital marketing, very little technical advice is timeless. In fact, some advice can change on the same day you utter it.

That raises the question: how do we know what advice to believe? How do we know what’s credible and what’s out of date, wrong, or even harmful?

The only answer to this question is knowledge – our own knowledge, and the knowledge of our trusted community. When you have a trusted community, a trusted group of peers, you can ask that community honest questions about what they think of a particular piece of advice. Our collective mind is greater than any one individual’s mind, and our ability to consume and process information grows with every member of our community.

If you’re a marketer and you don’t have a trusted community to rely on, now is the time to go find, join, or create one. Even if it’s just a collective of friends who are also in marketing, even if it’s just a WhatsApp or text messaging group, build that community now and use it to make everyone smarter and better. Sometimes, it will be the deciding factor whether or not you take a piece of advice that doesn’t feel right.

Shameless plug: if you haven’t joined Trust Insights’ community, Analytics for Marketers, come join us on our Slack instance.

This week’s Bright Idea is a pair of speaker charts. Many marketers are headed to conferences like INBOUND and Content Marketing World; see how the speakers for each event stack up.

Get the INBOUND PDF here (no form fill needed) and if you like it, please share it. If you’ll be at INBOUND, say hi to CEO Katie Robbert and register for her session on Thursday at noon.

Get the Content Marketing World PDF here (no form fill needed) and if you like it, please share it. If you’ll be at Content Marketing World, say hi to cofounder Christopher Penn and register for his session on Thursday morning.

In the rear view this week, we take a look at that old standby, the press release/news release. We blogged about the terms “pleased to” and “thrilled to” earlier this week, but that’s only a tiny fraction of the data that’s knowable about press releases. Let’s look at some of the other numbers that didn’t make it into the public blog post.

Total unique year to date press releases: 83,598
Average number of times a press release is cross-posted to different services: 2.9x (243,322 total releases YTD)
Average number of clicks a press release earns: 3.8
Number of times “leading” or “leader” used: 35,990
Number of times “solution” used: 22,482
Who uses the (over)used terms more? Agencies, by as much as 43%

Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week. It uses machine learning for the automated one-sentence summaries.

How To Use Off-Facebook Activity Feature To Control Your Data: The new Off-Facebook Activity feature allows you to know of and control data collection that other apps and websites share with Facebook to fuel targeted advertisements.
Facebook: Expect Oculus Insight tracking in future wearable AR glasses: Whether the first pair of all-day wearable AR glasses with Insight are ultimately Facebook-branded or co-created with another company remains to be seen.
Sorry, you already gave Instagram and Facebook your photo rights: Re-posting a hoax chain-letter unfortunately doesn’t revoke all the permissions you’ve already granted.

Media and Content

15 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress (Tried & Tested): Because images are usually the slowest files to load when someone visits your site, image optimization can have a noticeably positive effect on page speedwhich is a ranking factor as of 2010.
Smartphone, Social Media Users Have Broader Social Networks In Emerging Economies: Kenya and India are the only countries where a majority of adults do not use at least one of these social media or messaging services.
Rule Back-to-School: Marketing Tips for Reaching Educators: Back to school is the second-biggest shopping season of the year.

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

Artificial Intelligence: A Tool or a Threat to Cybersecurity?: To prevent data theft following cyber disasters such as Marriott International/Starwood multi-year theft, every industry has been taking large measures to mitigate these cyber threats by improving data security across the board.
Amazon Forecast hits general availability: So Amazon is aiming to make prediction more accessible with a fully managed service called Forecast that uses AI and machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts.
You Ask, I Answer: How to Improve Marketing ROI with AI?: And these are considerations that belong in the business requirements portion of the AI lifecycle.

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

Why You Should Integrate Real-Time Features in Your Mobile App: The next best thing about real-time features is that they enable multiple users to simultaneously update, add, delete, and edit data.
To aid AI research, Waymo releases massive sensor dataset from its self-driving cars: Inc.s self-driving car subsidiary, hopes to advance the state of artificial intelligence by providing researchers with new data for their projects.
How can you Convert a Business Problem into a Data Science Problem?: How effectively can you convert a business problem into a data problem?

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Googles new privacy standards want to save us from creepy ad practices BGR: All of which is a long way of saying, the mission here seems to be about promoting new web standards that are more in line with peoples expectations around privacy which are increasingly changing toward a less-permissive attitude than existed even a few years ago.
Are other teams unwittingly killing your SEO (and revenue)?: So, the problem I see is most SEO managers are not quantifying the value of SEO changes in the way the business is quantifying other changes.
Are we right for fawning over core algorithm updates?: Are the confirmed core updates any more impactful than your run-of-the-mill unconfirmed update?

Business and Leadership

Do businesses rely too much on cloud computing?: The cloud is owned and run by third party vendors.
[How do I get out of accounting overwhelm? by Danielle Hayden of @KickstartAcct](https://trustinsights.news/7pjba): This scenario feels so out of reach for so many business owners and it doesnt have to be this way.
Solving the agility vs. security conundrum: Similar to the transport of gold from coast to coast, previously static data resources became mobile and security took second place to accessibility.

Join the Club

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Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

Content Marketing World, September 2019, Cleveland
INBOUND, September 2019, Boston
MarTech East, September 2019, Boston
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2019, Washington DC

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.