Posted by Aimee Cozza on January 2nd, 20232022 may be over, but things that happened last month may have far reaching implications for your marketing in 2023. Let’s take a look at some of the most recent changes you should know about in the marketing sphere.
Find out if there’s a Google outage using the new Google Search status dashboard
While outages are rare, they do sometimes happen. Google has released a new public dashboard that shows if there are issues with crawling sites, indexing sites, or serving results on the Google platform. Much like a downtime tracker, this will help you determine “is it just Google today, or is it something I am doing” a lot easier. Check out the dashboard at https://status.search.google.com/
Twitter (still) in decline
Twitter is looking more and more like a place you may want to consider jumping ship from. Many advertisers have already pulled their ads from the tumultuous social media platform. Since Musk’s takeover, terms of service rules have been altered, waffled, and it’s hard to know what may or may not be allowed on the platform anymore. Even links to other social media sites were briefly banned for about a day. All we know is that far-right minded individuals are making a rise on the platform that is touted as “free speech” and you may not want your brand to be alongside folks like that in the feed. With Musk possibly handing over leadership to someone else, things are sure to remain in flux well into Q2 of 2023, at least. Keep an eye on it – only you can decide to pull the plug on a social media platform.
Is Mastodon the new place to be?
Mastodon has seen a surge in new user signups as journalists, artists, and more have switched platforms to this new-to-you social media platform. Many people struggle to get their heads around Mastodon’s grab about federated servers, but the big takeaway is that individual people own servers rather than a whole corporation. Because of this, rules can be different on each server, and data may not be entirely private, so if that doesn’t jive with you, Mastodon may not be a place you would want to sign up and post to.
AI generated artwork has taken over dashboards – and artists hate it
You may have seen a hubbub about AI generated artwork as it burst onto the scene just a few months ago. Users can use AI tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion to create artworks and worlds with the stroke of a keyboard. Using text prompts, the algorithms of these programs can produce images in just about any style. This may sound great in theory, but the algorithms were trained on massive amounts of data scraped from artists without their consent. While fair use may come into play, it has yet to be seen how the law looks into the works made from the backs of hard working artists. I wrote a blog post on my personal blog about AI artwork and what it is, which can give you more details about it.
In addition to this, a new social media trend using the app Lensa allows you to upload your likeness to receive profile photos made in the style of an artist. This seems fun, but is, again, built on the backs of artwork datasets from artists around the world. In addition to this, it is unclear if the company behind Lensa AI, Prisma Labs, is using or storing the uploaded images for anything else. Since we’ve all globally been forced to help Google train drone striking AI by using its image captcha, it may be best to guard your likeness a little closer – or perhaps hire an artist to make one for you.
New Year Resolutions
If your New Year resolution building involves planning and making future decisions about your use of social media, being aware of these big shifts and discussions may help you think about where you want to commit your time, energy, and money in the months ahead. And if you don’t want to worry about it, reach out to us and find out how hasOptimization can help you manage your social media strategy!
