Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically and as such, may contain various spelling and syntax errors

Germaine: [00:00:00] Hello, future tribe. Welcome to another episode of the future tribe show. I am Germaine

Kelsey: I’m Kelsey.

Germaine: And today we’ve got, I think we counted about 13 or 14 different news items, including Qatar’s tourism or marketing rebrand. The women’s world cup logo. That’s going to be in Australia, New Zealand. So it’ll be interesting to take a look at what they’ve decided the logo should look like.

Instagram, introducing an add yours sticker. We also want to talk a bit more about Facebook’s Meta rebrand. I think it was quite new last week when it came, when we sort of talked about it, but there’s a bit more than that. I want to add to it that we’ve learned over the last week. Facebook’s also stopped facial recognition, which I think is an interesting move.

Microsoft is the world’s most valuable company now I’m beating out apple and [00:01:00] Microsoft acquired clip champ. What else are we talking about, Kelsey? Yeah, we’ve

Kelsey: got a couple of things from Google today. I’m talking about sort of page experience and analytics. Google, my business profiles, Google ads, and some scamming news.

Google launching some page speed insights and also recommending Google is recommending placing videos on their own page. And we’ll be finishing off by talking about Yahoo saying goodbye to China.

Germaine: Yeah, the leaving China completely. This one’s going to be a meaty episode. Let’s get the intro rolling and get into it.

Kelsey: Sounds good. Okay.

Germaine: all right. So the big one start off with is the Qatar [00:02:00] rebrand for anyone watching, let me share what that is looking like at the moment. What are you thoughts, Kelsey?

Kelsey: So I quite like it. I’ve sort of, I have had a look through that extra information. I think it’s, it’s just nice and simple, slightly modernized, but they’re still kept the touch of.

I guess the history of Qatar they’ve sort of, you know, they’ve kept the Arabic part of the logo and actually emphasized a little bit more, which I think is really great. Yeah, I just, I quite like it. I think it’s really nice.

Germaine: Yeah. These sorts of tourism, like national brands are always interesting to me because you, you sort of want to represent your country, but at the same time, you need to look at what your, you want to say to the potential sort of demographic.

Now did they, so this is by the Qatar tourism council, but did they sort of talk about [00:03:00] anything particular around boosting tourism? Yeah. Okay. So as of 2017, they were sort of prioritizing tourism as a, as a sector of pursuit. ’cause I only know Qatar or like my biggest familiarity with Qatar is around there, their clout in the, in the business world and their ownership of, or that the money they pump into football as a, or soccer as a soccer fan.

And looking at it from a potential tourist destination point of view, or if I’m the target demographic, it doesn’t really tell me much. Would you agree with,

Kelsey: I mean, yeah, but how much do you want a country name, logo to tell you? You know I don’t think you want it to be jam packed with lots of imagery because it’s, it’s the name, it’s the brand of the country name.

And then the other supporting materials that come with it is the thing that will convince you. I think this is just obviously the starting point.

Germaine: Yeah, have they, so, [00:04:00] okay. Yeah. So the focus has been refining the branding really at this stage, which is fair enough. I think the final, the F think the co-branding sort of looks pretty nice.

Obviously bilingual there, which is nice. The patterns are quite nice as well. It’s tough because representing a whole nation, like you think brand new companies, difficult. Imagine branding a whole. Yeah,

Kelsey: it would be impossible. I do want to note these ones that are on the screen at the moment for people that are watching the video, I think are absolutely beautiful.

They sort of magazine full page things. I think a lot of the times when it comes to country branding, a lot of countries can kind of, or like tourism branding I should say, they can try to over-complicate this sort of magazine things, try to jam, pack it with all sorts of different imagery. But what they’ve done in those magazine pieces above just here is they’ve kept it really nice and simple.

I love that they’ve got some sort of modern architecture. That’s, it’s still got that [00:05:00] traditional feel and you can sort of still tell it’s, you know, that kind of country. But I just love the simplicity in it and the colors and the sort of yeah. Composition of them. It’s I just think it’s beautiful.

Germaine: Yeah. I didn’t necessarily buy the logo. I am, I want to visit Qatar now. Yeah.

Kelsey: I think the best thing about the logo is that it’s really simple. So it does work in all of that supporting stuff, as you mentioned, like, as you said, the logo doesn’t give you much, but when it’s in this context, it doesn’t pull away from the imagery.

And I think that’s really important. And I also love, as I sort of mentioned, they’ve still got the Arabic and they’ve highlighted the Arabic and also kept the English. And I think sometimes that can look complicated cause there’s two different things going on, but they’ve done it really nicely. And it ties in really nicely.

Germaine: They have, and the imagery they’ve used, the juxtaposition is, I mean, it’s stunning. Like they’ve, they’ve really shown restraint here. Getting these photos would have been. Not a, not a [00:06:00] small task, not an easy task. I’d be very surprised if these didn’t require a lot of editing in post to sort of get this, like, if, whether this, whether what they’re showing especially in, in what we’re looking at at the moment with sort of a boat and an amazing modern skyline in the back, and then some sort of wild animal in the desert.

It’s, it’s the kind of thing that I would think is hard to just photograph the, you need to sort of manipulate in post, but what it accomplishes is I think a really fantastic message around showing restraint. We’ve talked about it a fair few times around simplifying things and sort of condensing things as much as possible.

And they’ve been supported with the, with the taglines that again Smart is probably the best way I can put it. It’s succinct. It’s intelligent. And it’s just letting the imagery do the, do the talking. Yeah. Particularly things like 1400 years of art in one day is sort of tells you a lot [00:07:00] more than you would think.

Six or seven words can tell you. So they’ve yeah, I guess I’m taking back everything I said at the start though, I guess. Yeah. It doesn’t mean that the logo says more. It just, I think me. I’m just conceding. I think that it overall, they’ve done a very good job and it’s a reminder to look past just the logo I think.

Kelsey: Yeah, I was going to say it’s an important lesson. I think in, when you’re talking about logos, understanding that a logo is just one part of the brand and it is really important that your logo doesn’t need to communicate absolutely everything. It just needs to represent one thing and work well within the rest of the branding and the supporting collateral that comes with it.

Because once you’ve got that entire picture together, it works and it’s great.

Germaine: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it’s sort of about the execution overall rather than the logo by itself. Because in a lot of instances, it’s how you pull that whole representation off that matters. [00:08:00] Alright on from Qatar to the FIFA women’s world cup logo.

These are the only two sort of logo slash refreshes slash brands. We have to talk about this week being a bit light on that sort of news lately.

Kelsey: Yeah. I think we had a week a couple, couple of weeks ago that had like six or seven massive rebrands. And since then it’s just been absolutely quiet.

Germaine: Yeah.

But that’s it’s just maybe that time of year everyone’s sort of got it out of the way prior to the Christmas period potentially. So this, this one here is sort of showing the France 2019 logo next to the A U N Z or Australia New Zealand 2023 logo. I. I think historically I’ve found the world cup logo is much like the Olympics.

Much like any sort of sports event, quite an interesting study in [00:09:00] how you represent something like that, visually as, as a logo, because really it doesn’t change that much. I mean, you change the country, but you don’t change much else. So to me, it’s, it’s a bit complicated this new one.

Kelsey: Yeah. When I saw it, like, I’m, I’m not familiar with football, soccer, whatever you call it.

That’s not really my sport. I’m definitely into other sports more so, so I’m, I’m coming from a very outside perspective, but I think every time I see FIFA world cups or women. Women’s football world cups. They seem to be quite complicated to me. And this one in particular, I mean, coming from Australia and also being familiar enough with New Zealand, I, I don’t know what the connection is with the colors.

I don’t really know what that’s trying to communicate. I can see that it’s football in there. What are the colors saying? [00:10:00]

Germaine: Okay. So let’s look into it. So there’s squares representing 32 countries that will compete for the world cup. Then there’s colors. They call, they calling them shared colors, Australia and New Zealand are home to some of the world’s most distinct and inspiring natural landscapes.

And world-class cities. The color palette is vibrant and unique going beyond the host of flags and drawing from the rainforest earth Mount. Gosh, so there. They just call us that everything to everyone. There’s the new football had the core that it’s all a circle because it’s representing coming together.

Then there’s bold typography underneath all the, or I’ve already described four different elements and then there’s, underneath the dash. And then there’s a simplified version of the world cup trophy that the women’s world cup trophy. And then further, further on underneath that there’s the AAU N Z 2023 wording.

With [00:11:00] underneath the half of that sort of area is the New Zealand artistic pattern, whatever that means and the Australian artistic pattern, whatever that means as well. I think, oh man, you, you would think that this was designed by a uni student socially the way that they’ve brought in how many different elements and then community students.

Come on. It feels

Kelsey: like there was an assignment brief that you need to tick off all these simplistic elements. And I think that this is a case of what seems to happen a lot when it comes to these kind of like sporting competitions and things, they just get so complicated because they’re trying to do so much like representing all the countries, representing two different countries, patents going into the earth and rainforest and seas and all of that sort of stuff.

And just doing so much. And I, I just, I don’t know if it needs to be that complicated. Like I don’t hate it. It’s not sort of super offensive to look at, but I just don’t [00:12:00] know why it has to be so complicated.

Germaine: There’s also a lot, like they’ve built out a lot of visual imagery. I think I thought I saw further up that it was designed by the identity for the ninth edition has been designed by LA.

Based works collective. And then they collaborated with a Toronto based agency, which

Kelsey: if we’re coming to Australia, New Zealand, why are we not employing, I don’t know, Aboriginal artists or something. I mean, I’m sure they would’ve had to for part of it, but why, why are we using American based

Germaine: companies for this north American?

Yeah, I just don’t. So yeah, this, that they apparently worked with this Australian indigenous potentially I think indigenous artist. And this Kiwi artist again, I think maybe Maori I don’t know. I mean, there’s no way there’s no [00:13:00] way to say and I’m not going to make any assumptions. Yeah, she’s just referenced as well.

They both references local artists.

Kelsey: Why are we not employing local companies?

Germaine: And I, and I do feel like they really miss the mark here, because the, this shape the, for those who are, who are not watching, it’s essentially like a round circular shape that vaguely represents a soccer ball football that also has a bunch of colors that’s supposed to represent, apparently everything.

And then 32 little squares around that’s supposed to represent the nations, get it being involved. Like to me, that is that that alone is too much for a logo. Yeah. Let alone then jumping with the wording underneath and then finally representing Australia and New Zealand in a way that I think is quite weak.

Yeah,

Kelsey: they’ve kind of just thrown that pattern behind the AUNZ and the 20, 23 to say yep. He’s the countries stuff. And I know that they say that the [00:14:00] colors in the circular pot, the colors of, I dunno, I guess rainforest and.

Germaine: natural occurrences that almost every continent can say that they have not unique. Like the rainforests are not unique to Australia.

Kelsey: No, we’ve got some beautiful ones. Absolutely. But there’s many countries that do a

Germaine: hundred percent, you know, you may have heard of the Amazon before sort of, it’s sort of a very popular rainforest.

Yeah, I just don’t know. I feel like, like generally it’s very hard to comment on branding for things like world cups and sporting events, because what do you represent? It’s the same thing every X amount of years. And you need to then look at what is unique about that. And to me, that is where it’s being hosted.

It can’t be who’s being involved because that, that is often not finalized until there’s playoffs and so on and so forth. [00:15:00] Overall it that they’ve. Yeah. If you look at sort of the supporting design, I guess you would call it, they’ve really missed the mark. Like they’re calling out a rainforest, water, world-class cities, mountains.

Like, what is that very, very generic is that we could have applied all of this to any other country or city in the world. And then the only unique part is the beautiful, beautiful sort of local art from Australia and New Zealand that is genuinely beautiful. Potentially the challenge or the risk that they didn’t want to.

Well, because they’re from overseas, they don’t understand what the, what the local market’s going to sort of accept. Maybe they didn’t want to go too much the other way potentially. A very easy way to avoid that is just to get local artists from each of the nations to collaborate Australia, New Zealand.

We collaborate all the time. Australia [00:16:00] steals new, ki Kiwi actors and actresses and technologies and claims them claims them for our own. I’m sure we found a way to work together, I just don’t understand, but a message I think here to just work with organizations who have relevant market knowledge. I mean, w w w when we get asked to work with you know, individuals from overseas for overseas markets, it’s something that I hesitate to do because we just don’t have, I mean, we can apply general knowledge, like we’ve got, I would say we’d be better than sort of someone with less experience.

Still not as good as someone who’s got local experience. Yeah.

Kelsey: There’s so many case studies that I’ve read of massive companies trying to branch out into a new country and just not understanding the marketing and the like the everything. Like I think it even happened it’s, [00:17:00] I mean, it’s slightly different, but the five guys burger chain that opened up in Australia and Australians just went, this is rubbish.

Like, cause we love our burgers and I think five guys just didn’t understand that and they didn’t adapt their offering to understand the Australian market and that’s coming from quite a large chain. Like it can happen so easily just because you don’t work with the local. Exactly. Yep. They just didn’t do the correct research and it even happened.

I think when Bunnings opened up in the UK, there just wasn’t a demand for it. They didn’t do their research. It flopped pretty hard. And it was just a case of, work with the local markets, work with local agencies, whoever it is to actually understand what’s going on. Don’t just assume the model that’s working in one country will work in another.

It’s just not going to

Germaine: happen. I think it’s a great example too, of, you know, we, Australia is part of the west as a generic sort of collective term, but, and a lot of people think the west is the same. [00:18:00] Like, you know, you can go to the U S you can go to UK and you can go to Australia and parts of Europe and get.

The people are sort of similar and have a similar reaction, but this is a reminder that that’s, that’s not the case, even in Australia, between Sydney and Canberra. We’re, we’re three hours apart, but I would say, you know, in some, some cases we’re completely different individuals and how we like things is completely different.

I’m not, yeah, I’m not happy with it. I don’t think as a football fan, it does, it just does too much and gets nowhere. I think that’s an interesting juxtaposition and with the Qatar logo where Qatar just didn’t bother trying to represent everything and instead used the sort of other elements and use the, use the opportunity to expand upon it.

And did it really, really well. Moving on to Instagram, introducing an ad yours sticker.

Kelsey: Yeah. So it seems like Instagram is just [00:19:00] rolling out a whole host of different things we spoke about. I think it was the collab feature that they introduced last week. So this add yours sticker. I’m not a hundred percent sure on how it works, but it seems like you can put up a story and put up a sticker and it’s, let’s say outfit of the day or whatever sort of concept you want to ideally you want to come up with and your friends and followers can use that same thread essentially to upload their own image.

And it all gets joined in this one sort of sticker and we’ll show up all the other profiles that are posted under that sticker. So it seems like Instagram is really trying to focus on collaboration and like really making it interconnected between followers, partners, whoever it is. I just thought it was an interesting feature.

It’s not really something I’d seen before. I’m not sure how I in my personal life would use something like that. Cause I can’t really see myself. Jumping on it. Actually, well, I mean, in saying that I went to a wedding on the weekend and I was just thinking, we were obviously not to take photos cause that was professional photographers, but in [00:20:00] a circumstance like that, you could have sort of like a birthday tag or a wedding tag or something.

And everyone at that event could post photos and stories, maybe that would be a use case for, it

Germaine: could be useful across you know, like this is my dog, like upload photos of your dog, you know? Or this is my insert any, anything almost here. The, the fact that that creating like a public thread makes me think of Twitter and how Twitter sort of lets you comment publicly.

I am not a huge Twitter user. I’ve found that thread system to be a little bit confusing because you’re sort of starting with one thing and then the further you go down, the more removed, I feel like you get

Kelsey: insane. Yeah. I see it happened on Reddit even, and you just end up with all these different conversations and it’s like, what’s happened. Where are we?

Germaine: Yeah, rich. I wonder, I mean, I assume that this is part of stories, so that’d be a 24 hour window there. I’m not I know, I know you like using stories, Kelsey. And I [00:21:00] get, and I get the value around it, but I feel like around things where you’re asking people to essentially submit their own thing there might be something to be said for keeping those like responses around for longer than 24 hours to build out.

Could you imagine a Facebook group where every post only lasts 24 hours and then you lose that value essentially that you’re, that you’re trying to create, but. Then again, maybe, maybe Instagram, isn’t trying to create value. It’s just trying to increase collaboration between users and sort of that social slash community effect, maybe that’s for, yeah.

Kelsey: I mean, I think when it comes to stories, they really are intended to just be that 24 hour. It’s like short, sharp. Don’t think about it kind of thing. It’s temporary. And that’s the point. So I think trying to build out that sort of archive or whatever, doesn’t really apply in this circumstance. Yeah, and I mean, I think when it comes to posting stories and things, you usually save the photo [00:22:00] anyway.

So it’s not like it’s going to disappear forever it’s just not going to be live forever.

Germaine: So the collaboration with everyone though, like this is my in our Saturday morning add yours, but then you lose the real benefit benefit to it. But. And it just makes me wonder, like that, that the difference between Facebook and Instagram is increasingly like becoming, weirder artificially weird, I think like the adding the collab features and things like that.

And it’s sort of like the trying to keep them separate intentionally versus because, because you could see them converging, right? Like really, I’m not sure why. Well, if they were Google, I reckon they would have done something like that already. But

Kelsey: yeah, I think I like the approach that Instagram is taking.

Cause it feels like it’s more of a conversational kind of app versus permanent permanent stuff. It’s not like [00:23:00] building out. I mean, obviously you’ve got your feed, but I think when it does come to these stories and temporary collabs and all of that, it’s like, you’ve got to see it live. It’s like, you’re part of the conversation there in person rather than just looking at it later kind of thing.

And I think I do enjoy that.

Germaine: Yeah. Like just like join, join the conversation for the moment or for the 24 hours. Yeah, I just looked it up as well. I think the other thing is that Facebook has twice as many users as Instagram. Yeah. Okay.

Kelsey: Yeah, because I know there’s obviously a hell of a lot of inactive Facebook accounts.

Germaine: Yeah. Yeah. But YouTube has got 2.3 billion. Facebook’s number one, I believe with 3 billion then it’s WhatsApp as third. Instagram is fourth. Facebook messenger is fifth. So Facebook is, or Metta is absolutely dominating the space. But it makes me, [00:24:00] whoa, Instagram has just 450 employees apparently.

Which is like,

Kelsey: I mean, that makes sense. I guess. Cause it’s the offering is quite focused. Like they’ve got a few core things that they do Facebook obviously has like you go into your extras tab and there’s just a million things going on. Everything. Yeah. Facebook, I mean Instagram stories, feed direct messages.

That’s sponsorships yeah. It’s, it’s all very like focused on a couple of products. So I think the support team doesn’t need to be as significant as it would for Facebook or other apps.

Germaine: Yeah. Yeah. The, the whole stickers thing is an interesting concept, I think. And yeah, sort of, Instagram’s almost becoming like a Snapchat, but in, I don’t know, sort of that, so that temporary media sort of space because.[00:25:00]

Yeah. Apart from Instagram and Snapchat, I don’t think anyone else really does that. Facebook stories,

Kelsey: apparently WhatsApp is potentially introducing a disappearing kind of message thing. I haven’t looked into it, but I did see that pop up the other day.

Germaine: It’s like a, self-destruct probably scientists Senate, which Snapchat does, I believe.

Yeah.

Kelsey: Everyone’s kind of just stealing what Snapchat’s done, but doing a better and Snapchat sort of just stuck.

Germaine: It’s not just, it’s doing its thing. Whoa. You know, I think we talked about in a previous episode about snap the company behind Snapchat focusing more on their technologies as I think a white label provider rather than a social platform in itself.

Yeah. Smart talking about snap and Snapchat. I just wanted to touch on Facebook and Meta, once when they announced that the meta refresh or the rebrand of the company like alphabet was to Google. It was quite fresh when we hopped on this [00:26:00] episode. And over the last week, I’ve done a lot more research, listen to mark Zuckerberg, talking a lot more about their vision.

And I just wanted to sort of talk about, I think a lot of people feel like they’ve rebranded to Meta to get away from all the bad press that Facebook receives. I personally disagree with that. I think it’s not a, it’s not a matter of let’s, you know, distract people. I don’t think it works.

Kelsey: No, I feel like they would recognize that changing a brand name isn’t going to change. Yeah. All of those. Yeah. I don’t think they’re that’s stupid.

Germaine: Yeah, no, th th they’re much smarter than that. I think ultimately what it represents, and this has a this is, has a message for any business owners, anyone who has a brand out there it’s to me representing a new clear-cut direction and intention around this is [00:27:00] what we’re going to do moving forward.

This is what we’re changing to, and that can be done. They didn’t have to do it with a name change. That’s a more bold step. They could have done it with a branding, a logo shift, or refresh a brand messaging refresh. So it didn’t have to be done with a name, but I think given the gravity of how much they’re changing and the fact that the company was called Facebook and the app was called Facebook and they were two different things.

It was just made more sense to just, let’s just change the company name for the moment. But ultimately the goal I would say, and the message here is that you two should think about using a logo shift or change represent something more than just a distraction using it to draw a clear line and say on this date, we’re shifting our attention, or we are focusing our attention in this direction.

I personally bought a website that I think I mentioned to you as well, Kelsey. And one of the first things that I did when [00:28:00] I bought that website was changed the, the look and feel and I’m going to rebrand it in my, in my own time, over the next few weeks again, to represent, you know, this website that I purchased was sort of quiet for the last six to eight months by purchasing it, I want to represent that this is a new chapter. I purchased it from someone who didn’t have, who wasn’t as ingrained in the topic of the, of this website as much as I am. And it just represents a, this is it. This is the line, you know, there’s, it’s sort of like you know, before and after and everything after is different.

One interesting thing that I’ve picked up with Facebook’s Meta rebrand is that mark Zuckerberg is talking a lot about the augmented reality virtual reality side of things, which we touched on quite extensively. But he’s also trying to take on the subscription commissions that companies like apple are taking.

It’s been a topic philosophy is because [00:29:00] Apple’s had a lot of a lot of competition people sort of taking them to quarterbacks. And mark Zuckerberg is like, you know, it’s just too much of a cost and, and really sort of trying to hop on that bandwagon. But to me, it’s a very old school tactic of saying essentially undercutting the competition.

So, you know, going all these companies are fantastic, but let’s go, you know, we don’t need 30%. We’ll take a smaller cart. Similar, similar to what Hyundai and Kia did in the Australian market, where they went, we, we, you can have more warranty for less costs and we’ll just stick it to you to the incumbents until we get to a point where we’ve got enough market penetration, that we are just going to be priced like everyone else, which is where Hyundai and Kia are now.

So to me, it’s interesting to see a big company, like Meta take this approach, but then [00:30:00] again, they’ve clearly expressed that they’re happy to essentially break even. And because they add advertising business makes so much money and that’s just, they don’t have to focus on that. Right. They can just keep that going.

People are going to buy ads and they just break even on what this new direction, so that when the time comes, they’re the, they’re the Microsoft or they’re the apple of or, or in fact they’re the Facebook or Meta is the Facebook of this new chapter. Because I think you’d agree that Facebook really owns social media and they might not have been the first, but they definitely are the biggest and quote unquote the best.

Kelsey: Yeah. I mean, they’re definitely the first of the current generation, because I think before that it was my space, which obviously rip, although it might still be up, I don’t know.

Germaine: I think, I think they got bought and they became like a music sharing sort of service slash platform. Interesting. Yeah. But I guess the message there is that Facebook’s just, [00:31:00] Facebook’s a mainstay in the social media space and they want to become, you know, I was talking about sort of that, that operating system for your social life.

And it’s very clear that that’s what they’re doing and what they’re, they’re willing to lose money now to let’s be honest, make more money later by dominating that market something interesting or something need to come out of Facebook as well, is that they, they plan to shut down their Facebook sorry, the facial recognition systems which I haven’t uploaded photos to Facebook in a long time, but I do remember when they used to pick up and go, oh, looks like your friend, Kelsey is in this better.

Do you want to tag her? I just thought it was interesting that they are killing that all together because. I don’t know, is it just a, is this one, a bit of a bait and switch because like, Hey, we’re cutting facial recognition. Maybe they don’t need to do facial recognition anymore because they have so much information on every other facet of your life.

Kelsey: I mean, what benefit does facial recognition give the [00:32:00] user for one, besides helping them take photos easier? And what kind of information, I mean, I’m sure Facebook would get information from, as you said, they’ve got that much information, how much more does facial recognition add? It just seems like, I don’t know if redundant feature same as wrong, because I’m sure that there’s a place for that, because that was such a like groundbreaking kind of technology, I guess when it first came out.

But it could also be there. You know, they’re trying to rebuild a bit of trust in users. So by saying we’re cutting facial recognition, people go, oh, cool. They’re respecting my privacy more.

Germaine: You know, I think facial recognition as well was a feature to your point. Was more in your it was more in your face, right?

It was like, here, look at us. It’s sort of like when Google says, this is how much, you know, you traveled last week and sort of really goes, Hey, look, look, look, we are tracking where you’re going. And here is here. It is just laid out in front of you. I think the [00:33:00] facial recognition side of things was that it’s like, Hey, look at how much we know.

But by getting rid of it, that’s one thing it’s a bit of a bait and switch. It’s sort of hiding how much Facebook really knows. Ultimately all these organizations know more about us than any government ever could. I would, I would think and this is just them, you know, maybe a piece in the public, like you’re suggesting an interesting move, nonetheless, because I mean maybe there just wasn’t enough financial value around it.

Like what does knowing someone’s face do for you when you know their hobbies, where they go, what they like, or they want to buy who they’re friends with?

Kelsey: Yeah. It seems like the least valuable data point.

Germaine: It probably was the most valuable because that was probably the most, they knew at one point, but it’s a different story now.

Moving on to Microsoft becoming the world’s most valuable company beating on apple, it’s always like a one, two, like fight between them. And what I like about, [00:34:00] or what I, what I liked about this story and the fact that you put it in the notes was that they have such this such different organizations like Microsoft hasn’t had, I would say, apple’s done really, really well with the like tech products, the iPhone, and so on and so forth. And they’ve done really well with that. But Microsoft hasn’t had a product like that forever. Like they never really, I mean, it had windows, but apart from that, they didn’t have like, they failed in almost every other aspect yet they’re really sticking it to apple, like as such a big company.

And it’s just a message around the fact that becoming you don’t need to be necessarily at the top of everyone’s mind and you don’t necessarily need to be in the news all the time. If you can become a central reliable, nervous system [00:35:00] to more people. Okay. The become the, become the pickax for the gold gold miners, not, not the gold miners themselves, because guess what?

You can supply every single gold miner, whether they find gold or not, you’re going to do well. Whereas if you want to go mining for gold. Yeah, sure. You you’ll probably hit it big if you find gold, but what happens to the majority of that don’t find gold. That’s what

Kelsey: the thing I think is interesting is if you sort of look back on Microsoft and apple from this stuff, Microsoft and apple one point where competing in operating systems before we had the iPhone iPad, blah, blah, blah.

And then apple took off with those extra products. Microsoft tried to compete and just couldn’t quite compete as much in that space. And now they’ve got a new CEO. I can’t remember when he came in. I think it’s in the article. But then your approach is essentially to be boring as I mentioned previously.

And I

Germaine: think maybe [00:36:00] I think they’ve changed since Sacha Nadela thought.

Kelsey: Maybe I read that wrong.

Germaine: Well, w when in Adela became CEO of Microsoft when was it? 2018.

Kelsey: Okay. Like fairly recently

Germaine: recent history, for sure.

Kelsey: Yeah. In terms of sort of CEOs coming in and coming up with a new strategy, that’s quite recent because it does take that time to come in, find out what’s going on, implement things.

And obviously the boring strategies paid off for them. They’ve just made products that are reliable and accessible in terms of, I mean, if you look at the surface, I think they’ve got various levels of surface that are really accessible at all kinds of price points. They’ve just got the, X-Box doing this X-Box stuff, all the operating systems, things like that.

They’ve just not tried to be fancy and crazy branded and all that sort of stuff. They’ve just

Germaine: made viral as well. I would say, not that they haven’t tried to be. I think if, if they [00:37:00] could have been, like, they tried with the Zune, they tried with what windows phone they tried. They tried. But I think what they’ve done instead is because. Like they’ve got Microsoft Azure or they’ve, they’ve got 365, they’ve got sort of, they compete with Google and Amazon in a way that apple just simply cannot. And no one looks at apple as a enterprise solutions provider. No, ’cause, they’re just,

Kelsey: they’re too focused on the products and that’s, that was great for them.

But I think at this point, that’s where they’re going to sit sort of stagnant until they start innovating in other things and introducing products that don’t have notches that break and things like that.

Germaine: Well, th th they’ve to me, Apple’s always put design ahead of functions, the wrong word, but I don’t know.

They’ve always seemed to prioritize design is what I would say where Microsoft has just wanted it to be that classic, you know, always, always they’re just reliable as much as possible. [00:38:00] Saying that though, it’s like, they’ve, they’ve. LinkedIn, they’ve acquired a lot of other companies. And recently they acquired clip champ, which is a online video editor.

So to me, it’s interesting that they’re getting into those spaces because they’re all a lot more consumer-focused then business focused. But you know, as long as like for apple, they really need a new iPhone. They really need a new Mac book to kick things up a notch to, or to keep at the V or just to keep things going, like, keep, keep that boat sort of saying sailing along where Microsoft has reliable, ongoing income, and they can acquire companies like LinkedIn and clip champ that are more consumer focused, but don’t necessarily need them to succeed because there’s, they’ve got that reliable income from elsewhere.

Yeah, it’s just a, again, a message there [00:39:00] for those of you who are listening to it’s fantastic. Going from viral, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s it’s something that everyone aspires to do, but you don’t need to always go viral. Jumping from that into a lot, a lot, a lot of Google news. And this, again, Google’s just Google does this every once in a while, where they sort of release a bunch of changes.

And they love to just go back on what they’ve done in the past or get rid of products. They, I can’t think of anything that they’ve any products that they’ve gotten rid of recently, but they are changing Google my business, Google my business is becoming Google business profiles. Google my business has gone through like five different iterations driven by Google plus yeah,

Kelsey: it was that.

Germaine: Yeah, yeah. Google my business used to be Google plus local or Google plus business. They used to be like, I think my places are Google places and now they’re becoming Google business profile. It’s [00:40:00] essentially what they’re doing is migrating those pages into your maps in Google search. It has, it’s, it’s been a bit weird because to me it’s not the, the delineation hasn’t been quite obvious because Google my business sort of shows up on Google maps and shows up on Google search, but doesn’t really exist on its own.

I know you can do like posts through Google my business, but it’s really just meant to help you manage your business profile, which makes all your profile for an entity whether that’s business or, or whatever else. So it makes sense that they’ve shifted this way. But it’s still unclear how, like for us, we’ve got, you know, a lot of clients definitely in the double digits that we manage through Google my business, I wonder how that will change.

I want to have that sort of representation of Google my business because they swap into profiles. Do we then become like a profile manager and manage multiple profiles yet to see. On on top of that [00:41:00] Google has done a few things around pages and how they look at pages. So they launching a new version of page speed insights, which historically Google’s really popular for launching tools that are half baked and confusing at best

like I mentioned, a website that I purchased earlier on and I was looking at it through Google page insights and it was sort of giving me a bad score, but it wasn’t really telling me how I can improve the score for example, which is just poor experience. Yeah, you’re getting 17 out of a possible score of a hundred, and these are some general to general ways to sort of improve it.

But there it’s not immediately obvious how much of an improvement those things would lead to. And I’m, I’m hoping with this new version that they’ve shifted from a tool that most people even we used to say, just ignore page speed insights, just use these other tools, third party tools, because they were better.

They gave you more information, actionable information. So maybe Google sort of taken taken [00:42:00] a page out of sort of those different books and integrated that in. And as an extension of that, they’re talking about using page experience to rank desktop sites. They’ve shifted to a mobile first experience or ranking system.

And to me, what that really means is that we’re going to see less websites that are. Negative experiences. Like I’ve been on websites that every time you click a link, it pops up an ad before we go to the next page it. It’s just frustrating, right?

Kelsey: Yeah, it is. So I think the page experience stuff, it was something they’d rolled out on mobile, I think around August, maybe.

So in November, well, this month they’re going to be pulling it out on desktop sites. So it is really going to take into account. How quick your website is to load how responsive it is. And that visual stability is what you mentioned. When you go on a page and you go to click on something and then the page jumps and you’ve clicked on something else.

And it’s just, oh, it kills me, but it’s [00:43:00] really good because that means that Google will start penalizing those sites. So you’re going to have a much better viewing experience on both mobile and desktop soon because the sites that are showing up, they’re going to be the ones that don’t have those issues.

So it’s exciting. Also a good note. If you do have a website to make sure that you don’t have those issues and try to minimize that, and it tends to happen when there’s like, if you’ve got banner ads, let’s say at the top of your website, that changed sizing stuff like that, make sure you fix those.

Germaine: Or like things like big assets that take a little while to load.

Like we’ve seen clients with sites where they have a big image in the header and the image doesn’t load for another five seconds because it’s five times the size of the whole website or the, or the homepage. And. FA Google, sorry, is essentially saying you need to prioritize experience. So don’t have big images.

And if you do use there’s all sorts of different ways that we can, we can sort of compress them and deliver them differently. Some like the [00:44:00] worst examples of websites, Kelsey, I don’t know if you’ve seen this before they load, and then they blink as they swap the font too. Like the font that it’s meant to be and things like that when a slow website that swaps all the fonts.

So the whole page loads, then they, then it takes about two seconds to swap the fonts over and it resizes again, just avoid all that where you can. And if you’re listening to this and you’re not sure if your website has a bad experience opening it up in an incognito window, open it up, using a different browser.

And. Think about as well. I’m testing it with like an ad block, for example, enabled because all those things can impact how a how a user sees your website. And when you’re someone who’s always working on your website, always loading your website. It might not seem slow because a lot of that information is.

But a new visitor is not going to have been on your website inherently have seen your [00:45:00] website before. So try and see what they see, try and see how they experience it, because that’s what Google is going to be looking at. They don’t care how it, how it reacts to you or how it works for you. They care how it works for the majority of people.

So they’re just, they’re just really going down that road of making, in my opinion, making the web a better place and incentivizing nice websites rather than websites that are designed to make money. Speaking of which Google ads has been leading people to like phishing scams PA. I S H I N G not the F the hobby fishing.

I’m not sure. What could, could you imagine what a phishing scam like like, I dunno, would you like pay for a weekend away at a fishing spot and then turn up and see that it’s, it’s not efficient, it’s

Kelsey: a little industry. I think you could get a lot of people to fall for that.

Germaine: So it’s not that kind of scams, but I, I wanted to bring this up because it’s [00:46:00] silly at the very, at the very least getting approved on Google ads, getting ads approved can be really tough.

So I don’t know how, like, we’ve, we’ve certainly had a legitimate clients with legitimate, like sending them to product pages sending visitors to product pages, get, get sort of manually reviewed and us having to sort of struggle through that in the past. And that’s with. Ads accounts that manage multiple, like, and have been managing multiple accounts that have been doing in good standing, never had issues.

So with that’s with us having some sort of history, I don’t know how these scam sites get through. Just,

Kelsey: I mean, I guess that’d be good at what they do cause they’d be scamming the people reviewing the ads as well.

Germaine: True fair point. I guess it’s it’s, you know, the people behind Google or people. So maybe that that’s what it is.

Or maybe you have software doing some of these, these reviews [00:47:00] and if you sort of work out ways work out what they’re looking for and show them what they want to see. They’re not people they’re not going to be able to tell when they’re being manipulated. I’m the last one from the Google news is that they actually recommend placing videos on our own page for maximum impact.

Now. This one’s interesting because in the example that they’ve shown us, they’ve essentially gone title video, and then text content underneath it’s relevant. When we’re talking about, like, we were talking about the podcast pages and transcripts this morning. So in, in this instance, we would certainly be looking at restructuring the page layout.

So the videos from the podcast episodes are at the top with text underneath. I can see why Google wants to provide that as well, because chances are you’re going to be hosting on YouTube. And if you’re driving people to a video and the videos at the top, rather than lost in the middle, that’s [00:48:00] certainly a good outcome.

So makes sense. But I think it’s a bit slightly where the Google sort of. Given this sort of information out publicly, because it’s the kind of thing that we would have to sort of find by experimenting. But they’ve just come out and said it. So yeah, heads up if you’ve I think so. Yeah. I don’t know whether we have, you probably don’t have a lot of articles with the videos in the middle of the page, but if we do we’d need to look at how we can restructure it.

A lot of review websites have videos down the middle, like towards like, you know, it’d be reading like a review on Sony’s latest headphones and find the video review in the middle of a tech startup. So maybe incentive for them to put the video at the top. So that like that sort of multimedia is presented first.

And maybe Google’s also fine. In fact, I’d say almost certainly that video engagement’s higher than text engagement, and this is just Google incentivizing that further.

Kelsey: Yeah. I would became to [00:49:00] see the videos at the top. Cause there’s a lot of times I’ll go to, I think even news articles and the news sites will have ads and there’s like maybe two videos in the article.

One of them is an ad and one of them is the actual video to watch. And I can never tell which it is. And I start watching one and I wait for the ads to finish. And it’s just, it’s a frustrating experience. Again, talking about experiences, some websites and probably Google saying, if you put it at the top, people know this is the video to watch, make it nice and easy and you’ll benefit from it.

So I’m looking forward to that change.

Germaine: And I think, ah, I’m right there with you and those sites that you play a video, the ads show, and then. And then they become like an embedded picture picture ad on the top, right? While you watch the video and some in the worst case they compete because the audio from the ad never stops.

So as my goodness, it’s fantastic for the people making money off those things, but it’s not good for, I would say not good for [00:50:00] literally anyone else, because it leads me to hate the advertiser as well. So it’s only good for the publisher because, you know, if, if you’re advertising, if your video is distracting and annoying and playing over what I want to actually watch, I’m not going to have a good association with your brand.

Just putting it out there. Absolutely. And the last one, and to me, this is not surprising, but quite big news is that Yahoo is leaving mainland China as of November, once it’s already happened. That is huge to me. Microsoft last month announced that they’re shutting down LinkedIn in China. And the, what they’re citing is really that the they need to share too much data about the users.

Kelsey: I was wondering if that was the, yeah, cause obviously China has a lot of its own internal social channels and things. I wonder if like LinkedIn wasn’t competing and then [00:51:00] because of that, didn’t want to share information, same sort of thing with you. I hear it makes sense.

Germaine: It’s a big, it’s a big market though.

They have 850 million internet users versus the U S that has only 313 million. So by like that is, I mean, there there’s articles saying that it’s more than twice. I would say it’s almost three times the users really? Yeah. Yeah, but I

Kelsey: mean, if you were to stay in China and China’s requesting information about users, would that not be more of a risk to these companies to hand over that data?

Because that would also include the data of international people, surely to continue operating there. And therefore it’s more of a risk for those companies. If it were to come out that all this information had been handed over to the government and then all the users in all the other countries go, what do you mean?

You’ve given my information to China and then they leave. It’s probably, I mean, yeah, I guess that’s why they would’ve done it. A [00:52:00] smarter move to leave than risk the other

Germaine: bit. That’s true. It’s, it’s, it’s true and you’re not wrong, but you’ll then leaving a huge market. And I wonder what will happen here?

Like is, is China going to have, like, China’s already got, you know, I’ve seen references to. Blah, blah, blah, the Google of China or blah, blah, blah, the WhatsApp of China. There are lots of apps that aren’t necessarily copycats. In fact, some of these apps came before the Western version of it or inspired the Western version of it, but yeah, longer term, like, okay.

So are we allowing private companies to have all this information about us, but not governments? It’s, it’s a bigger question. And I think for a long time, a lot of companies have wanted to get into China and it’s interesting to see sort of almost a shift in the other direction.

Kelsey: Could it be political influence as well in the current sort of [00:53:00] climate landscape?

Who knows? Yeah.

Germaine: But definitely something that I wanted to mention because I think it’s, it’s big, like Yahoo, I think Yahoo has been doing well personally. I don’t think. I haven’t thought about Yahoo for a long time. They’ve sort of got palmed around, had funny rebrands and had been doing well.

So for them to move, leave a big market is a big move, but here. Yeah. What other other people think? And I don’t know many who operate, like, I don’t know personally many companies or individuals who operate within the Chinese space, but certainly interesting. Especially given like the fact that China, like Huawei, for example, Huawei’s Chinese, isn’t it?

Kelsey: Yeah, I think so.

Germaine: I think so. Yeah. So like Huawei for example, got ba like isn’t we were just talking about this the other day as well. Like they’re not really, they’ve lost their presence in the Western world when they used to dominate that. Like at one point they partnered with Google to build a, like a Google phone and I find it was awesome.

[00:54:00] So it’s definitely politically motivated, but I wonder, yeah. It’s a big battle between government and who gets to have all this data and in countries. The last thing I wanted to mention was a really interesting report from search engine journal, which is a pretty interesting blog and website, if you are into SEO or search engine optimization if you have a website I, or, or business, I think you should sort of pay attention to this.

We’ll include a link to a report they generated recently. And just a few takeaways, probably nothing. That’s going to surprise you, Kelsey, but of all SEO activities, content marketing takes up is the most likely to take up the major, share of a digital marketing budget and made share of attention, which I don’t see you sort of gasping or looking surprised that

Kelsey: content is king. That’s what they always say.

Germaine: And no surprise there. Further sort of looking at the results. 33% of [00:55:00] SEO pros still think that meta descriptions, titles, H one tags and other on-page elements are really important. So it’s, it’s a bit more technical, but if you’re listening and you want to do your own SEO, guess that’s a bit of a message to go, still look at on page.

On the, on page side of things further on for that 38% of respondents, this is SEO professionals reported that clients think that SEO is essential part of marketing. I couldn’t agree more talking about Google ads and all those sort of channels you need to, you need to keep focusing on something more like we do a lot of content writing and content publishing Kelsey, and well, you know that because you manage a little bit how much does it cost us apart from.

Like nothing, nothing. And how long, how long do the effects last forever? Like, it’s, it’s, it’s a very obvious thing, but it’s nice to see that sort of confirmed with a report. One of the interesting things though, is that about 40% of [00:56:00] respondents see the zero click results as a, as a great threat.

So things like Google giving you the answer off the top as a huge threat. So Google essentially cannibalizing their are the industry that sort of helps them sort of continue to be strong. Which makes sense. It’s, it’s this weird position to be in, right? Cause you want to rank for things like, like you want to be the answer and have the answer or be

Kelsey: this link through as well as the website from that answer.

Germaine: But if you get the answer straight off the bat,

Kelsey: Yeah. I mean, it’s probably a 50, 50, I think in my experience when I’ve used those answers, it tends to be like, I’ve, I’ve got part of the answer and then I’ll go, all right, this website knows what it’s talking about. I’ll get the rest of the answer I need by visiting it.

And it’s, it probably just depends on how complicated the answer you’re looking for is if it’s literally just a one-word answer. Yeah. You’re not going to have click-throughs if it’s a little more complicated, you’re going to get click throughs. So

Germaine: a hundred [00:57:00] percent. But then, oh, are people going to see your response and go, ah, that was a bit more succinct.

I’m just going to look into the other pages, like second or third result, because they might be more detailed because they might misunderstand. That response. Isn’t the whole, isn’t the entirety of the response. It’s just what Google picked up. Another thing is that over a third of SEO professionals plan to focus on user experience over the next year, which I think is very relevant.

Yeah. In line with what we talked about around what Google is trying to do. So I think all in all, it’s, it’s an very detailed report. It’s 49 pages long. So we’ll, we’ll w what you do have to give in, like give, give search engine journal. I think it is your contact info, a company size it’s, it’s no doubt a, a lead gen for them.

I don’t know what they do though. Like with that information, what they’re going to try and sell you. So that’s the disclaimer, but it is an interesting report. Talk, get, gets into the insights, opportunities, and threats. So if [00:58:00] you’re a business owner, if you’re an SEO professional, if you’re in marketing, I think this is something that you should read.

Just as another data point to inform you, you are moving forward. Yeah. Nice. Awesome. That’s it for this episode, anything, anything that we’ve missed or forgotten?

Kelsey: Only thing we haven’t mentioned is happy birthday to you. Germaine birthday today.

Germaine: Oh, well, thank you. Thanks. I was like, what are you?

There’s this normal notes and we’d I’d thrown in a few bonuses as well as I was going on.

Kelsey: Yeah, no, it just a little mentioned this so happy birthday and everyone in the comments, make sure they have birthdays birthday.

Germaine: Oh, that’s too nice. Well, on that note, let’s roll the roll the outro and we’ll talk to you next week.

Go catch you guys next week. Bye.[00:59:00]