Mediaboss Marketing

As eCommerce continues to rise, so too do deceptive methods of advertising, including fake reviews, undeclared paid endorsements and other practices that fall foul of federal laws.

And now, the FTC is looking to step up its action on this front, with the Commission this week sending out notices to over 700 businesses, including Facebook, Amazon, and LinkedIn, about their use, or facilitation of false reviews and ads to promote products online.

As explained by the FTC:

The rise of social media has blurred the line between authentic content and advertising, leading to an explosion in deceptive endorsements across the marketplace. Fake online reviews and other deceptive endorsements often tout products throughout the online world. Consequently, the FTC is now using its Penalty Offense Authority to remind advertisers of the law and deter them from breaking it.

The FTC says that by sending its Notice of Penalty Offenses to these organizations, its effectively notifying each of their need to either address these issues, or risk penalties of up to $43,792 per violation.

The Notice of Penalty Offenses allows the agency to seek civil penalties against a company that engages in conduct that it knows has been found unlawful in a previous FTC administrative order, other than a consent order.

So now that the FTC has sent out these warnings, it has a legal basis to implement penalties in future instances, if so detected.

What the specifics are in each case is unclear, but the FTC does explain that the range of violations highlighted in its notifications include:

These violations cover a broad range of practices, which are particularly applicable in social media marketing, and with the use influencers in promotions also on the rise, its worth familiarizing yourself with the latest regulations to ensure that you dont also fall foul of the FTCs rules.

The FTC has also created an overview guide to its endorsement rules to provide more assistance in this respect.

Itll be interesting to see whether this new push from the FTC actually leads to more specific legal action on this front, and what that will mean for the marketing sector. And again, with the use of influencer marketing on the rise, you can imagine that many will fail to meet the specific criteria, leading to further concerns.

As such, it is worth reading up on the latest rules.

The FTC has published a full listing of the 700 companies that its sent out notices to here.

Originally posted here:
FTC Sends Out Official Warnings to Over 700 Brands Over the Use of Fake Reviews - Social Media Today

Shares of SEMrush Holdings (NYSE:SEMR) -- the online visibility management tool -- jumped 150% from its March IPO by September, before falling back to 100% appreciation today. Other than IPO hype, there has not been any reason for this jump.

The irrationality of this share-price appreciation has left some investors wondering if this software-as-a-service company still has growth ahead of it. Even though it has a market capitalization of just $3 billion, the valuation of 20 times sales worries investors, but its leading solution could provide plenty of growth for the business in the future.

Image source: Getty Images.

SEMrush's goal is to improve the visibility of its customers online. As people spend more time on their phones and on the internet, they can be overwhelmed with the amount of information and advertising they receive, which can lead to some people blocking this information out. This can lead to difficulties for companies looking to break through the noise and abundance of information online to be visible to their target market.

SEMrush provides an all-in-one solution for companies to find key insights that allow them to advertise their products efficiently. Its comprehensive solution allows for its customers to advertise on social media, but also employs search engine optimization (SEO) to take a long-term approach to their advertising strategies. While SEMrush's competitors like Moz and Similarweb (NYSE:SMWB) focus on one part of a company's advertising strategy, SEMrush offers a broad range of options to its customers.

SEMrush offers an unbiased view of its immense data assets -- which include over 20 million domains, 20 billion keywords, and analysis on 1 billion events each day. Unlike Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) or Facebook (NYSE:FB), which are incentivized to promote their own advertising channels, SEMrush provides an unbiased, customized view on the best advertising options for its customers.

Thanks to this comprehensive analysis solution, combined with its vast data sets and unbiased view, the company has become a market leader in numerous marketing technology categories from search advertising to social media management. This leadership has allowed the company to attract many impressive customers including Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS), Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), and eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY). These customers have also expressed how valuable SEMrush is to their advertising strategies: In Q2 2021, SEMrsuh's net revenue retention was 121%, and its average revenue per user increased 19% from the year-ago quarter.

SEMrush's 76,000 customers in over 142 countries have helped the company reach impressive financial performance. Even as a top dog in the industry, the company saw 58% year-over-year revenue growth in Q2 2021, to $45 million. The company has been building on its 50 offering by launching a Keyword Difficulty solution that enables its customers to optimize their SEO marketing efforts.

For the full year, the company expects revenue to reach $183 million, which would mark 47% growth from 2020. The only downside for SEMrush is its profitability. Even after 13 years of operations, the company lost $279,000 in Q2 2021. This was, however, a strong improvement from a net loss of over $2 million one year ago. Free cash flow stands at $9 million so far this year, and with cash balance of over $180 million, a minor net loss is not a dealbreaker for the company.

Aside from valuation risk -- which is higher than Similarweb's valuation of 12 times sales -- the company is facing heavy competition. While its analytics platform isn't as unbiased as SEMrush's, Google and Facebook are heavy hitters in this industry, and companies only looking to advertise on those two sites might overlook SEMrush. There's also plenty of competition from smaller pure plays in each respective marketing technology category, and while SEMrush is a leader in many of those spaces, it could potentially lose out to competitors that focus on one specific advertising category.

What many companies want, however, is an all-in-one solution. Many of SEMrush's enterprise customers are not looking to advertise through one avenue, but through many, and SEMrush provides enterprises with one platform where they can analyze data for all of those advertising strategies.

SEMrush's vast data assets and comprehensive solution -- which has been shown to be very valuable and successful to have -- are unmatched by its competitors. It's also extremely important to its enterprise customers who are looking for actionable data and insight to make effective marketing decisions.

With a current market opportunity of over $13 billion, this company clearly has tons of potential to expand, and with its unique, hard-to-replicate solution, SEMrush is well-positioned to capitalize on it. Because of this, SEMrush is still worth buying today, even though it has already seen strong share-price growth.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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This Company Has Nearly Doubled Since Its March IPO. Is It a Buy? - Motley Fool

Miami, Oct. 11, 2021 Miami Dade Colleges (MDC) North Campus has been awarded a grant for nearly $1 million from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) for MDCs Miguel B. Fernandez Family School of Global Business, Trade and Transportation. The funds will be used to support projects that teach undergraduate minority students how to develop businesses and commercialize products and services in the domestic and global marketplace. Campus administration will discuss how the grant will be used for the creation of the Business Entrepreneurship Development project during the Hablemos de Negocios (Lets Talk Business) seminar at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 12.

As the nations largest open-access college, MDC continues to find innovative ways to expand opportunities for its students to earn practical credentials to impact the local and global marketplace immediately, said Fermin Vazquez, North Campus Interim President. Providing financial support and guidance from business owners and entrepreneurs will play a critical role in breaking barriers to degree completion and accelerate the transition into the workforce.

The three-year Business Entrepreneurship Development project targets minority students at the Hialeah, North, West, and Wolfson Campuses. The grant will be used for student incentives, such as tuition and fees towards a 12-credit College Credit Certificate Business Entrepreneurship Specialist: Start-Up Venture, and micro-credentials, such as Hootsuite Platform and Hootsuite Social Marketing certifications. Students will participate in seminars, entrepreneur-led classroom presentations, group mentoring sessions, one-on-one entrepreneur-business counseling sessions, business headquarters tours, business plan competitions, and more. In addition, MDC faculty will benefit from professional development workshops.

MDC serves a large population of low-income, minority students. This program can create opportunities for students to earn academic degrees while working in partnership with a dynamic, multicultural community of local entrepreneurs and small business owners to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in todays highly competitive business workforce.

For more information, please contact Theodora Laing, tlaing@mdc.edu

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MDC North Campus Awarded Nearly $1 Million for Business Entrepreneurship Development Project - The Reporter

Food delivery app Swiggy is in the early stages of launching a new social commerce vertical named Swiggy Bazaar.

According to the company's job postings on LinkedIn and GetWork, the SoftBank-backed unicorn is looking to set up a vertical that will focus on community group buying for groceries, including fresh supplies, with the possibility of adding more categories in future.

Swiggy has been conducting a combination of external as well as internal hiring including for several technology roles - to build the vertical.

The Bengaluru-based startup, which is in talks to raise funds from Invesco and others at a $10 billion valuation, is ramping up its non-food delivery verticals - such as hyperlocal grocery and essentials delivery service Instamart - which contribute almost 25% to its total revenue.

The company did not immediately respond to ET's queries seeking comment. News portal Entrackr was the first to report the development.

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Social commerce platform DealShare uses the community group buying model and Meesho, which is also backed by SoftBank, ventured into group buying for groceries earlier this year through Farmiso.

ET reported last month that Meesho, which raised $570 million led by Fidelity and B Capital, plans to use some of the new capital to scale up its grocery business.

DealShare, which recently raised $144 million from New York-based investment firm Tiger Global, is also in talks to raise $150-$200 million as competition intensifies in the space.

This is one of the three models typically used by social commerce platforms, along with the reseller model which Meesho pioneered and live commerce, by Trell.

Earlier this year, Walmart-owned Flipkart also ventured into social commerce through Shopsy, which claims to have amassed over 250,000 sellers since launch a little over three months ago. Shopsy is not available for groceries as of now.

A handful of social commerce startups like Meesho, DealShare, Otipy, and CityMall have attracted investors this year, especially those focussed on fresh groceries and packaged goods.

According to an analysis by market research firm RedSeer, the group buying market has been pegged at $50 million as of 2020 in India.

In a community buying group, a local influencer or community leader works with the platform and usually receives commissions for each order. These local influencers are well entrenched in their communities and trusted by those in the neighbourhood, which helps garner more customers for the platform.

Local influencers are responsible for ordering and delivering the orders in their locality. Social commerce companies incentivise them through monetary benefits, as these influencers help them tap into tier 2 cities and beyond.

According to Swiggy's post on LinkedIn, the manager's role will include experimenting with community-based marketing initiatives across social channels, including building and leading a team of community leaders.

Being a social commerce business, Bazaar will experiment with novel community-based marketing strategies, that you will help conceptualise and execute, according to the job posting.

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Swiggy to test social commerce for group buying of groceries - Economic Times

This month,Hootsuites Social Media Marketing Manager, Amanda Wood, and her team test the performance of Instagram Reels versus TikToks.

As part of our collaboration with We are Social Media, we are excited to bring you another round of insights and learnings from the social media experimentswe run each month!These experiments help our team further understand the platforms that we use daily, and were sure youll also find them very useful.

For this months experiment, we worked with Stacey McLachlan to conduct a test around the performance of TikTok versus Instagram Reels.

For those of you who arent familiar with how Reels or TikTok videos work, there are some subtle differences between the two, but both Instagram and TikTok allow users to create, edit and share short-form video content.

They also both incorporate music and sound effects and offer a variety of fun filters and effects for users to play with. The Instagram Reels Explore page is based on various data sources and ranking signals, while TikToks For You page is more customized to its users interests.

There has been some debate in the social media marketing world on whether the Reels or TikTok format gets more attention. TikTok advocates claim that the TikTok algorithm is better, while Reels fans believe that Instagram is trying hard to push this new format to its users.

Lets dive into the findings from our experiment.

Before we developed our methodology, we wanted to align on a hypothesis.

We consulted the social team for their thoughts. Brayden, our Social Marketing Specialist, gave us his thoughtsIf a brand has little to no following, I think its way harder for their Reel to go viral, he says. Whereas with TikTok, I dont think your brand necessarily needs to have a big following for your TikTok to blow up and go viral.

On the other hand, Eileen Kwok, our Social Marketing Coordinator here at Hootsuite, voted for Reels as the superior platform for engagement, saying, the competition on TikTok is high right now.

Stacey ultimately chose Reels for the hypothesispredicting that Reels will perform better since Instagram seems to be pushing Reel content heavily.

We created and posted five short videos per platform on fresh test accounts that were as identical as possible over the course of a week.

One thing to note was that we strayed away from including hashtags that may have skewed the results and cross-posted the Instagram Reel to the main feed and Reels tabs.

During the week, we monitored the performance on both platforms, and there was a clear winner by the weeks endTikTok.

On the Instagram Reels account, each video got a maximum of 2 views per post versus the same TikTok videos garnering on average 450 views. It was indeed a stark difference!

While the experiment showed that TikTok was the superior platform for reaching a new account and new content, its essential to acknowledge that it did not test how much engagement Instagram Reels would have with a pre-existing audience.

If you already have an existing engaged audience on Instagram, you might find its a better strategy to double down on that audience and focus on Reels.

Its safe to say that TikTok does a better job of pushing content out to its users than Reels doesespecially with no audience to begin with. Perhaps down the road, we will test this experiment again with existing accounts that already have a large following and possibly garner a different result.

As TikTok and Instagram Reels continue to develop as platforms, its crucial for brands to keep up to date on how their algorithms work as they elevate their social media strategies. These platforms may or may not even house your target demographic. So stay updated on social data to see the advertising audiences and reach of different platforms.

At Hootsuite, we publish a quarterly update on our Digital 2021 Trends Report that includes some great in-depth data on the internet and social media usage. I encourage you to test and experiment with these platforms yourselvesyou might be surprised by the results you receive!

This month,Hootsuite's Social Media Marketing Manager, Amanda Wood, and her team, try to get shadowbanned on Instagram.

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In this article, Amanda Wood, Social Media Marketing Manager at Hootsuite examines five social media experiments and their findings.

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Instagram Reels Vs. TikToks: Performance Insights And Key Learnings - We are Social Media