The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes and Soundcloud.
In this episode, we share some major announcements coming directly from Google and Facebook and give you some quick updates in the lightning round.
Social Media
1. Introducing Portal From Facebook
Facebook has rolled out a brand new way for you to connect with your friends and family. The Facebook Portal is now apart of new age at-home technology; allowing you to be connected and active.
“What if you could easily connect with your closest friends and family and feel like you’re in the same room — even when you’re miles apart? Today, we’re excited to announce Portal and Portal+, two new video communication devices for the home that dramatically change the way we keep in touch.”
Key Takeaways:
- Portal and Portal+ are available for preorder
- Portal 10in display – $199
- Portal+ 15in display – $349
- The Smart Camera stays in the action. It automatically zooms and pans to keep you in view. Smart Sound minimizes background noise and enhances your voice as your talking.
- Voice Control + Alexa allows for a hands-free voice control. You can start a video much like talking to a Google Home; “Hey Portal, call mom”. It has Amazon’s Alexa built in so you have access to Facebook and Amazon at the same time.
- Built with Privacy and Security in mind – Let’s hope
- Disable the camera and mic with a single tap
- Passcode Protected
- They also spell out what type of information the portal is receiving when in use.
2. Google Home Hub
Google joins the race for the at-home technology. While Facebook puts an emphasis on connection, Google’s Home Hub seems to put an emphasis on how easily this technology can integrate into your daily life. This Home Hub is equipped with the powerful Google Assistant while its rival has Alexa’s inferior technology.
“The building blocks of the “smart home” — connected lights, plugs, and other gadgets — have been around for years. But they were strung together by a variety of confusing protocols. It wasn’t until Amazon’s Echo and its accompanying Alexa virtual assistant came along that the smart home started to make sense. We didn’t need just smart devices; we also needed voice controls and seamless interoperability between devices. Basically, we needed a proper smart home ecosystem.”
Key Takeaway:
- Googles Home Hub is an easy choice for an android user and frankly iPhone users.
- You really have to buy-in to the idea of having a complete smart-home if you want to get all the cool features.
- Features
- 7-inch display
- Two Speakers
- Controls
- Home Lights
- Music/Video
- Thermostat
- Camera
Google News
Project Strobe: Protecting Your Data – Sunsetting Consumer Google+
While Facebook was busy doing some crisis management for another security risk, Google had their own security breach. The failed social media platform, Google+ had a few bugs that released information about 500,000 Google+ accounts.
“Every year, we send millions of notifications to users about privacy and security bugs and issues. Whenever user data may have been affected, we go beyond our legal requirements and apply several criteria focused on our users in determining whether to provide notice.”
Key Takeaways:
- Users can grant access to their Profile data, and the public Profile information of their friends, to Google+ apps, via the API. The bug meant that apps also had access to Profile fields that were shared with the user, but not marked as public.
- This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender, and age. (See the full list on our developer site.) It does not include any other data you may have posted or connected to Google+ or any other service, like Google+ posts, messages, Google account data, phone numbers or G Suite content.
- We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks. That means we cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug. However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API.
- “We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused.”
SEO
100+ Marketers Share The Link-Building Techniques That Work Best
It’s no accident that we chat a lot about link building on the podcast. It’s an important ranking tactic and people that do it well, quickly see the benefits in a number of ways. These attracting inbound links can help your website performance by increasing your domain authority, exposing your brand to another website’s audience, and potentially send real high-value traffic from their site to your own.
“For companies reliant on content marketing as an acquisition channel, backlinks are still one of the most important elements for improving overall visibility. It’s still one of Google’s top ranking factors, which means marketers will continue to value inbound links (albeit, to a fault in many cases) above all else.”
As we know, link building is a crucial part of anyone’s marketing efforts. Why? Because when done right, it’s a highly effective way to grow your site. Databox offers up 7 key link building techniques to boost your organic traffic.
Key Takeaways:
- Create Great Content
- Fix Bad (or Non-Existent) Links
- Get Published With guest Posting
- Sign Up For HARO
- USe PR and Outreach
- Answer Questions on Q&A Sites
- Stand Out From Competition
Lighting Round
In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.
- Youtube Cracks Down Of Duplicate Content Videos
- Facebook Growth Dependant on Instagram
- Facebook Updates for 2019
- Google Benefits From GDPR
Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!
