Latest Digital / Social Media Marketing News & Insights

​Presented by Neal Schaffer​

In this week's newsletter:

• AI did not give marketing teams their time back, and there is now data explaining why.
• Your buyers are researching through a system that will argue against you.
• Around 72% of Gen Z say they miss opportunities because they hesitate to step forward.

Hey Reader,

I have a list of things I keep meaning to do. Three books I want to write. A Substack for discoverability. Short form video (a few different channel ideas, actually!). Posting on LinkedIn four times a week instead of whenever I remember. That list has not moved in months.

So last week I did the only thing that has ever reliably worked for me. I spent money.

I hired a videographer here in Southern California through Upwork, rented a studio through Peerspace, and showed up Wednesday last week. The files came back Monday of this week. Ten finished videos, which means I can no longer tell myself I have nothing to publish on YouTube.

This came up on my weekly Digital First Group Coaching call this week, too. One of our members has a speech she needs to record, and she said out loud that if she only tells herself she is going to do it, it will never happen, but if she tells the group, it gets done. She'd had the same conversation with her barber, who pointed out the obvious: now people are going to start asking how the podcast is coming along.

Here's the thing, though: neither of those is a productivity system. Telling people and spending money are just two ways of moving a task out of your own head, where it stays optional, and into the world, where somebody is waiting on it. AI has made the doing faster than it has ever been. It has done almost nothing about the starting.

So my question this week: what is the one thing on your list that has not moved in six months? Hit reply and tell me what it is, and let that be the thing that finally gets it out of your head.

Now let's get into this week's updates.

Please note: Some links in this newsletter are affiliate links. If you make a purchase through them, I may earn a small commission—at no extra cost to you.

This Week's News

How To Approach Meta Advertising Control - Meta keeps telling you to let the algorithm handle it, and Jon Loomer mostly agrees. Mostly. He walks through the specific places where manual control still earns its keep: age and gender, custom audiences and remarketing, detailed targeting and lookalikes, and placements. Defaulting to hands-off is not the same as being helpless, and advertisers who override the wrong settings quietly cap their own reach. Audit which controls you are actually touching before your next campaign build. Jon Loomer​

AI Chatbots Talked 57.5% Of AI Users Out Of Buying - Here is the number that should reset how you think about AI search: 57.5% of AI users have been talked out of a purchase by a chatbot. Semrush surveyed 2,338 US adults and found 65% have replaced some product-related Google searches with chatbots, and 4 in 10 dislike chatbot ads. Your buyers are researching through a system that will argue against you. 65% replaced, 57.5% dissuaded, 4 in 10 hostile to the ads. That is the new funnel. Semrush​

How To Make YouTube Shorts: Requirements, Specs, And What Makes One Work - I have published 211 Shorts on my own channel, and the retention data surprised me. Shorts under 40 seconds hold a 70% median share watched. Go past two minutes and that drops to 22%, even though YouTube now allows three. In my latest post I separate three questions people conflate: what makes YouTube treat an upload as a Short, how long one can run, and what length actually keeps people watching. The longer format is available. That does not make it the better choice. Neal Schaffer​

How To Get AI To Recommend Your Business - Most AI visibility advice stops at "publish more content." This interview with Liron Segev gets specific about mechanics instead, including fan-out queries, where AI generates dozens of related searches beyond what the user typed. His workflow is unglamorous and repeatable: take newsletter issues that already proved themselves with your audience and republish them on your own site where AI can crawl them. The systems doing the citing are training on what exists now. Social Media Examiner​

How To Become An Amazon Influencer (And Build A Storefront That Earns) - I was an Amazon Influencer until my account was closed for inactivity, which taught me more than the storefront ever did. In my latest post I break down the four moves that build one that earns: qualifying with an engaged account, applying with your strongest platform, building a browsable storefront, and publishing honest reviews. Commissions run roughly 1% to 10% by category, with exceptions on both ends. No follower minimum. If people already ask where you got things, this is worth an afternoon. Neal Schaffer​

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More Recommended Reads

Why AI Hasn't Solved Marketing's Time Problem - AI did not give marketing teams their time back, and there is now data explaining why. Knak's production study found 85% of teams missed at least one campaign launch date and 82% still spend half their time on production. First drafts got faster. Approvals at 47%, design at 38%, and coordination at 36% did not move. The bottleneck was never the writing. So what exactly did you buy when you bought more output? MarTech​

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LinkedIn Shares Insights Into Younger Professionals - LinkedIn surveyed 18,050 professionals across 12 countries, and the findings matter if you hire, manage, or market to early-career people. Around 72% of Gen Z say they miss opportunities because they hesitate to step forward, held back by fear of bothering people, being judged, or sounding inauthentic. More than half are unsure how to start networking at all. Meanwhile 27% found their current role through online professional communities. The networking layer is moving into communities, and platforms are building for it. Social Media Today​

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EEAT SEO: What It Means, And What It Actually Takes - Two months into deliberately building E-E-A-T signals on my own site, I have nothing to report, and the math says there would not be. In my latest post I share the five-minute technical check anyone can run: view page source, find your JSON-LD, and inspect whether your author node is doing what you think. Mine was not. My article:author tag pointed at my Facebook business Page instead of a person. Fix the markup this afternoon and stop undermining the years of work that actually move the needle. Neal Schaffer​

Harvard Found The Public Has Little Objection To AI Taking Search Marketers' Jobs - Harvard researchers surveyed 2,357 people on how morally objectionable they find automating 940 occupations. Search marketing scored 2.31 out of 7, near the bottom. The study also found the public already supports automating about 30% of occupations at current AI capability, rising to 58% for a hypothetically superior one. Public permission is not a skills gap you can wait out. If your value sits in work a model does adequately, that argument gets harder every quarter. Search Engine Journal​

UK Publisher Loses 98% Of News Search Visibility After .com Move - A UK news publisher moved from .co.uk to .com and watched trending-query visibility fall roughly 98% within two weeks. Four months later it had not recovered. NewzDash tracked it, and the piece is careful that the domain move is not proven to be the sole cause, with standard tools estimating a 60 to 70% drop rather than 98%. Either number is a catastrophe. Domain migrations look like plumbing right up until they are surgery. Search Engine Journal​

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