Even a pandemic couldn’t slow down developments in the search industry — it did, however, drastically influence the features that platforms rushed to launch and sideline other concerns for SEOs. For instance, Google’s new link attributes were hardly a topic of discussion, despite being such a lightning rod when they were announced last year. And the Android search choice screen in the EU? COVID disrupted the smartphone supply chain, making it uncertain whether it actually shifted in search market share.

Bing and Google both revamped their coronavirus-related search results pages, giving us a preview of what the SERP might one day look like. The game changed for local SEOs who had to deal with GMB malfunctions, some nonsense about keyword stuffing business descriptions, as well as helping their clients navigate a slew of new COVID-related features and tools.

And, we couldn’t omit the calls for gender equality and diversity that rang throughout the search industry — they may be easy to forget as we return to work, but the “new normal” is what you make of it, so make it more equitable in 2021.

Read the entire recap here.

Join us online, February 23, 2021 at SMX Report: a deep dive into everything you need to know about analytics for search marketing. Book now for just $99!

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Our series of MarTech Live video sessions which aired August through November last year, brought martech professionals, consultants and analysts together to look at some of the fundamental building blocks of successful marketing ops strategies. Among the topics covered were managing the stack, email ops, marketing automation and agile marketing.

The two last sessions of the year, on ABM and digital asset management, focused on getting off on the right foot with the relevant strategies. DAM, in some form, is a must-have for any business doing digital content marketing — and it’s hard to think of a business which hasn’t invested heavily (to the best of its ability) in that space in 2020. 

For B2B marketers, working against a backdrop where heritage target accounts might be retrenching or postponing investments, a reminder of the basic principles of ABM is timely. Find accounts with the capability to buy, the intent to buy, and the propensity to buy from you. But both these sessions go far beyond the basics to talk about operationalizing your DAM and ABM strategies.

All MarTech Live sessions are on demand here.

MarTech Today’s “Customer Data Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide ” examines the market for customer data platforms and the considerations involved in implementation. This report answers the following questions — What features do CDPs provide? What trends are driving the adoption of CDPs? Does your company need a CDP? — It also includes profiles leading vendors, capabilities comparisons, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

Get it now »

Early last month, researcher Timnit Gebru’s departure from Google made headlines due to her status as one of the leading figures in ethical AI. She’s also one of the few Black people working in AI, and by extension, one of the few on Google’s AI team. Her research paper about the risks associated with training language models using large datasets from the internet may have been the catalyst for her departure, and for most people, it totally flew under the radar.

“Language models trained from existing internet text absolutely produce biased models,” Rangan Majumder, vice president of search and AI at Microsoft, told Search Engine Land. That’s because the internet isn’t an equitable space — “‘programmers English’ is called ‘programmers English’ for a reason,” said Dawn Anderson, managing director at Bertey. If models trained on biased text from the internet are rolled into search algorithms, they may perceivably reinforce biases, and “so begins a perpetual cycle of reinforcement bias, potentially,” she added.

Read more here.

The pandemic is changing the game for retail, and fast. Not only is the competition fiercer than ever before, but the coronavirus has been the cause of a dramatic decrease in in-store traffic.

While the situation has forced some companies to shut down, many have realized that if they want to break through and maximize profits, they will need to adapt to more flexible business models with the adoption of new technologies. In order to remain competitive, online and offline experiences must “wow” the consumer. Having a great product is not sufficient to satisfy today’s buyer profile.

The secret sauce for these struggling businesses lies in the ability to combine in-store and online shopping to create an omnichannel retail strategy to provide the best possible experience all around, without having to choose one or the other. In today’s modern economy, the inter-connected customer shouldn’t have to choose either.

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“Leadership is different than management. Leaders are exploring, going to new places. Managers are enforcing, using authority to improve results. Leaders have to invent what is possible.” Seth Godin, author and speaker.