Good morning, Search Marketer, welcome to July,
The Facebook protest kicks off today. See the latest on which brands have joined. And, in case you missed it, contributor Karen Amundson shared media plan alternatives without Facebook Ads for those participating.
"One thing I've been telling clients is to be honest with their audiences," Ahava Leibtag of Aha Media Group told me in an email. "Big brands can afford a pause. Smaller (tiny) brands (clothing, jeweler, niche tech, etc.) cannot afford to pause."
Ahava suggested telling customers something like, "We get 90% of our revenue from Facebook ads. We would stop but if we do we would go out of business, which is also irresponsible to our staff and our customers. Instead, we're pledging 10% of our revenue in July to X to help support social justice causes like X."
Thanks for writing in, Ahava!
During last week's special episode of Live with Search Engine Land on diversity recruitment and retainment in agencies and marketing organizations, we discussed why diversity is good business, what intentional commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives looks like, as well as recruiting, hiring and retainment practices to achieve diversity goals. Our panelists also shared ideas for how employees can initiate change in their organizations. You can now watch the full discussion here. I hope you find it as valuable as I did.
On the news front, Bing made significant updates to its Webmaster Guidelines. "You want to make sure to read those guidelines to understand how the search engine works, and ensure you do not take steps that lead your site to be penalized by the search engine," says our own Barry Schwartz.
Also, Google will soon do away with the "Sponsored" label on desktop Shopping ads and replace it with a black "Ads" label for consistency.
Read on for Search Shorts and more.
Ginny Marvin,
Editor-in-Chief
