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Google announces Strategic Partnership with Salesforce
Google has announced a first-of-its-kind strategic partnership with Salesforce that spans Google Cloud and Google Analytics to enable smarter, more collaborative experiences for their customers. As cloud-native companies, this partnership offers a unique opportunity to turn marketing, service and sales data into actionable insights and better business outcomes.
The new collaboration leverages the full value of Google Cloud. Salesforce has named G Suite as its preferred email and productivity provider. In addition, Salesforce plans to use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for its core services as part of the company’s international infrastructure expansion.
Facebook introduces Messenger Chat plugin for business websites
Facebook has revealed details about version 2.2 of its Messenger platform, which comes with a highly requested customer chat plugin. With Messenger Platform 2.2, Facebook aims to help businesses and developers “reach their customers in new and engaging ways.”
Google Maps gets a new look
First, Google has updated the driving, navigation, transit and explore maps to better highlight the information most relevant to each experience (think gas stations for navigation, train stations for transit, and so on). They’ve also updated the color scheme and added new icons to help you quickly identify exactly what kind of point of interest you’re looking at. Places like a cafe, church, museum or hospital will have a designated color and icon, so that it’s easy to find that type of destination on the map. For example, if you’re in a new neighborhood and searching for a coffee shop, you could open the map to find the nearest orange icon (which is the color for Food & Drink spots).
Snapchat sells new audience-targeted Filters through revamped self-serve ads tool
Snapchat is making its Sponsored Filters more accessible to advertisers and more agile for targeting.
Mid-November, Snapchat introduced an alternative to its Sponsored Geofilters ad format called Audience Filters that can be targeted to specific audiences regardless of location and can be bought through its updated self-serve ad-buying tool, Ads Manager.
Facebook will tell publishers, creators the top Pages that shared their videos
Facebook will give brands, publishers and creators a better idea of who’s contributing to their videos’ viewership on the social network.
Facebook is rolling out a new tab to all Pages globally that will list the top five Pages that reshared the videos they posted to Facebook, the company announced on Wednesday. The five Pages are selected and ordered based on the number of views that their reshares generated.
YouTube kills ads on 50,000 channels as advertisers flee over disturbing child content
For the second time in less than a year, major advertisers are fleeing YouTube after finding their ads were paired with offensive content — this time, directed at children. And the number of disturbing videos targeted at child audiences is much larger than previously known, YouTube’s response reveals.
Over the past week, YouTube says it has “terminated more than 270 accounts and removed over 150,000 videos from our platform in the last week.” The company also “turned off comments on over 625,000 videos targeted by child predators.
YouTube Blog: 5 ways they are toughening approach to protect families on YouTube and YouTube Kids
“In recent months, we’ve noticed a growing trend around content on YouTube that attempts to pass as family-friendly, but is clearly not. While some of these videos may be suitable for adults, others are completely unacceptable, so we are working to remove them from YouTube….Across the board we have scaled up resources to ensure that thousands of people are working around the clock to monitor, review and make the right decisions across our ads and content policies. These latest enforcement changes will take shape over the weeks and months ahead as we work to tackle this evolving challenge. We’re wholly committed to addressing these issues and will continue to invest the engineering and human resources needed to get it right.”
Announcing Google Play’s “Best of 2017”
To close out another great year for Google Play, they’re sharing the best and most popular apps, games, music, movies, TV shows and books in 2017.
Facebook tests moving non-promoted posts out of news feed in trial
Facebook is testing a major change that would shift non-promoted posts out of its news feed, a move that could be catastrophic for publishers relying on the social network for their audience.
A new system being trialled in six countries including Slovakia, Serbia and Sri Lanka sees almost all non-promoted posts shifted over to a secondary feed, leaving the main feed focused entirely on original content from friends, and adverts.
Instagram announces top hashtag of 2017
For the fifth year in a row, #love is the top Instagram hashtag. “There can never be an excess of love. We always need more,” says paper typographer Sabeena Karnik (@sabeenu) from Mumbai, India. “It is the most powerful feeling which can be expressed in so many ways: the smallest act of kindness, a caring word, a hug, a smile, a kiss.”
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