✅ Monday briefing #16: Industry report, conversational surveys, buzzword busting, Google analytics update, talk to me, Facebook group therapy, Zoom marketplace, personal data control, and more

Industry, tools, data and reports, best practice, social media and platforms, and privacy

Good morning. My name is Stephen Waddington. This is a weekly summary of news from my blog and topics discussed in a community of practice that I run on Facebook. You’d be welcome to join us. My thanks to all the contributors.

Industry

✍️ INDUSTRY REPORT: The GCS COVID-19 Communications Industry Report tells the story of a profession demonstrating agility, innovation and resilience. It identifies eight areas of opportunity based on interviews, case studies and a literature survey. I’m led the research and wrote the report. Source: Stephen Waddington.

Tools

💬 CONVERSATIONAL SURVEYS: Sticky Beak, the research tool that uses conversational chatbots, has raised $500k to fund further development of the platform. It uses ad targeting to recruit participants, not matter how niche. Source: Maja Pawinska Sims.

🗞️ GOOGLE MEDIA TOOLS: Journalist Studio is a suite of tools to help reporters do their work more efficiently, securely and creatively. DataSet Search, Factcheck Explorer, Flourish and Pinpoint, all have applications for marketing and public relations. Source: Andrew Smith.

🔧 MEDIA RELATIONS TOOLS: Best practice - beyond trusted relationships - is a CRM with integrated list management, emails, and story publishing. It’s a growing market. Vendors include Prezly, Prowly and Propel. Source: Philippe Borremans, Alan Morrison, Rachel Picken, and Darryl Sparey.

🕐 TIMETRACKING: Investigate Clockify or Toggl Track if you charge for your time or want to track how you spend your time. Both tools are free for a single user licence. Spotted: David Brain and Kate Hartley.

📝 BUZZWORD BUSTING: The Buzzsaw removes buzzwords from text. To check a draft document against a list of jargon, visit the site, paste your draft into the box, press the button and it will be red-lined. Report omissions to its creator @HamishMThompson. Spotted: Diane Garfield.

📉 GOOGLE ANALYTICS UPDATE: Users should build a new Google Analytics GA4 property. Run dual profiles and compare your familiar reports with the new data. The new platform is designed to adapt to a future with or without cookies or identifiers. Source: Andrew Smith and Kristin Philbin.

Data and reports

📊 COVID-19 COMMS: Ofcom’s latest data dump is a 600+ spreadsheet on COVID-19 UK media consumption. It finds social media use is voracious across all ages; BBC TV News presenters are most influential; and radio reaches the over 55s. Source: Dan Slee.

👩 INFLUENCER DATA: Paid activity and engagement is down on all platforms, apart from Tik Tok according to the Traackr State of Influence report. Societal issues are top of mind for influencers, namely COVID-19, lockdown, and social justice. Spotted: Stephen Waddington.

👂 TALK TO ME: Vixen Labs is upbeat on the future of voice. A fifth of UK consumers have a smart speaker in the home (Ofcom). 80% have searched for products and services, 70% for specific brand, and 40% are willing to buy stuff. Source: Stephen Waddington.

Creative

🏪 AISLE OF ALDI: The best creative is based on a human insight. The new Aldi ad by McCann UK celebrates the Aisle of Aldi. It also pokes fun at TV ad creative at a time when we could all do with a laugh. Spotted: Rob Bruce.

🍩 IKEA DONUT: The Swedish furniture business has announced plans to buy some of its main products from customers at 30% of the original price, and resell them in store. The initiative will be launched as a contrary response to Black Friday sales. Spotted: Stephen Waddington.

Social media and platforms

🖼️ INSTAGRAM DISCLOSURE: Instagram has committed to a series of tweaks after being busted for allowing rogue influencer advertising. The paid partnership tag will be extended to all users along with a prompt to add disclosure information before posting. Spotted: Sarah Waddington.

👥 FACEBOOK GROUP THERAPY: Online special interest and local community groups are thriving according to data published by Facebook. 77% say the most important group they are part of now operates online. 86% have said they received some form of support from others. Spotted: Alan Morrison.

📺 ZOOM MARKETPLACE: Zoom has created a market for activities and events on the video platform. OnZoom manages scheduling, payment and reviews, and includes cookery classes, exercise, lectures, and virtual tours. It’s US only for now, with international rollout planned for 2021. Source: Andrew Smith.

🎥 YOUTUBE DOMINATES VIDEO: In a study by Moz of 2.1m searches and 766k videos, YouTube accounted for 94% of all video carousel results on the first page of Google. It’s the only game in town for video discovery. Source: Andrew Smith.

Must read

🔐 PERSONAL DATA CONTROL: A new standard called Global Privacy Control (GPC), lets users set a single setting in their browsers or through browser extensions telling each website that they visit not to sell or share their data. A dozen organisations are developing the specification. Source: Máire McGrath.