Why less is more when presenting and showcasing your expertise; Thursday’s daily brief

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Good morning, Marketers, the possibilities are endless.

Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t always occur to us to explore them — that applies to a lot of topics but today I’m talking about MUM, the technology that Google previewed at I/O last week. It’s purportedly 1,000x more powerful than BERT and capable of multitasking to connect information for searchers.

“A huge limitation of accessing information is the language it’s written in,” Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan said at I/O, “There are insights about Mt. Fuji in Japanese you might not know exist if you don’t search in Japanese, but MUM can transfer language across multiple languages to give you a richer, more comprehensive answer.”

To me, that means that, if MUM can deliver on Google’s promise, travel-related resources are going to be more accessible than ever. That may also mean that competition in the search results will also be internationalized. And, MUM is multimodal, meaning it can process information across text, audio, video and images. Might this decrease the language barrier and work to disseminate information across borders?

I remember struggling to find authoritative resources to apply for visas to enter Vietnam and China when I visited — MUM might make those struggles a bit easier for international travelers. Now, imagine this change unfolding across numerous verticals. How might it affect yours? I’m dying to know, email [email protected] (subject line: Watch your language).

Note: Google is currently running internal pilot programs with MUM and no public rollout date has been announced.

George Nguyen,
Editor

Google Marketing Livestream is happening today

After taking 2020 off, Google Marketing Live is back in livestream form. The event kicks off today at 8am PT / 11am ET and you can expect a slew of PPC-related announcements. If you can’t make it, no worries, we’ve got you covered, read the latest right on our homepage or get caught up with tomorrow morning’s newsletter. We’ll also be hosting a panel at SMX Advanced on June 16, where experts will dissect the announcements and discuss which ones mattered most to advertisers. 

In case you’re wondering what types of announcements Google makes at Marketing Live, check out our roundup from Google Marketing Live 2019, where the company first announced the monetization of the Discover feed, a revamped Shopping experience, gallery ads for search and more.

Why less is more when presenting and showcasing your expertise

Speakers have different reasons for presenting at industry events. Many people like public speaking or do it to improve their presentation skills. Others enjoy teaching and giving back to an industry they love. However, more often than not, at least part of the reason someone is presenting is to promote their brand or gather leads. This is where “less is more” comes in. Stay with me here because this is going to sound counterintuitive.

Less is more concept #1: Many speaker’s think that they have to go into detail about who they are and what their company does in order to be seen as a thought leader or prove they have authority to speak on the presentation topic. Yet attendees are there to get solutions to their problems through your presentation content, not to find out who your clients are. Keep your introduction to a minimum and jump into your great content. It’s the content that will allow you to shine as a thought leader.

Less is more concept #2: Your logo doesn’t need to be on every slide in order for people to remember you or your company. What attendees will remember is what they get out of the presentation and if you had solid, actionable content. Keep your logos to a minimum. Only put them on the first and last slide. Again, if you provide terrific content and help someone solve a problem or improve their work life, they will remember you and often seek you out on social media.

Less is more concept #3: Don’t sell your services or product features. Unless the presentation is specifically meant to be a product demonstration in a direct sales situation, any reference to your services or product during the presentation will diminish the quality of the content in your presentation. One sentence about your company and how to contact you at the end of the presentation is enough. Once again, let the quality of your content speak for you.

I know this is easy to say and hard to do when you’re hoping for some solid business leads, but speakers who deliver the promised content get satisfied attendees seeking them out and good feedback, while those who sell often get lower scores, negative feedback, and no contacts after the presentation is over.

Questions or comments? Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

Instagram is giving Reels creators more data and the option to hide likes on posts

When it came to Instagram’s Reels, it used to be that brands and creators only had access to the same metrics the public could see (likes, views and comments). Earlier this week, the platform announced that it was making more data available: Now, the number of plays, accounts reached, saves and shares will be available within the Professional Dashboard. In addition, Instagram is also making more data available for its Live feature, including accounts reached, peak concurrent views and shares.

There’s also more change afoot: Beginning this week, Facebook will begin rolling out the ability to hide Likes on both Facebook and Instagram posts, the company announced Tuesday.

Why we care. The new Reels and Live analytics can help brands create more content that resonates with their audience, which is especially important for businesses that rely on social commerce. This will also help Instagram keep brands and content creators on its platform and compete with TikTok, which already offers users these types of analytics.

“Likes” counts can entice users to check out a piece of content, so we’ll have to see whether creators and brands actually move away from it en masse. If they do, smaller brands may have a better shot at attracting new customers.

Site speed and security are driving interest in WordPress alternatives

When you really think about it, it’s crazy that such a huge proportion (65%) of websites (including ours) are created and delivered using an open-source platform launched in 2003 for then-novel bloggers. WordPress has been so successful because its community of developers has made it resilient and versatile, with plug-ins numbering nearly 60,000 allowing for significant customization. However, the consequences of being based on old code that anyone can plug into means the platform suffers from security vulnerabilities and code bloat. The resulting slow-loading, insecure pages are exactly what marketers are trying to avoid as they optimize their sites to rank well in search engines. 

Meanwhile, people are consuming content on a multitude of devices — from mobile phones to refrigerators to voice assistants — and marketers are looking for efficient ways to reuse and deploy the content they’ve created rather than serving every type of device with its own CMS. These trends are leading more and more marketers — those with a dedicated development team on hand, anyway — to explore the possibilities of headless and hybrid content management systems, which give content creators a user-friendly interface and allow developers to use APIs to distribute their work on devices we haven’t even thought up yet.

This is part of what we’ve learned while developing our newly-released MarTech Intelligence Report on Enterprise Headless & Hybrid CMSs. 

Find out more.

Use your Google phone to get Google Maps directions to the Google store where you can Google Pay for your Google products and merch

40% of SEOs say they’re going to remove AMP. The Page Experience update is delayed but it’ll still be here before we know it. Aleyda Solis conducted a Twitter poll asking what professionals will do when AMP will no longer be a requirement for the Top Stories carousel. The largest proportion of respondents, 41.2%, said they’re going to remove AMP, 35.3% said they’re going to keep adding AMP pages and 23.4% said they’ll keep their existing AMP content but not add any new AMP pages.

Come on, that’s funny. In last Wednesday’s newsletter, I wrote about Amazon’s potential acquisition of MGM Studios. The deal is now official and so are the memes.

Google’s real, physical store. Microsoft has stores, Apple has a bunch of stores and now Google is opening its first brick-and-mortar location in New York City this summer. I hope they’ll sell those cute 3D-printed Googlebot figures.