The pandemic has sparked new use cases for social listening, an underutilized tool in marketers' work belts. But some brands, like Johnsonville Sausage, were already well-acquainted with the concept. Stephanie Dlugopolski, the company's senior manager of PR and social media, said her team has utilized social listening for nearly a decade. It has allowed them to not only monitor conversations about the brand, but also see how consumers react to larger issues.

An example: At the end of 2020, the keepist blog published part of its analysis of the German Asos site, asos.de. Keepist praised Asos for its videos, as well as an interactive sizing assistant that asks shoppers for additional details of their shape and how they like to wear clothes.

In February 2021, Oculus’s vice president of content Mike Verdu announced in a blog post that more than 60 games available for the Oculus Quest and Quest 2 were “generating revenues in the millions,” with six topping $10 million each.

In response to The Journal story, Instagram published a blog post asserting that social media has positive and negative impacts on users, citing two 2018 studies as evidence. TikTok sees an opportunity: The Instagram rival announced steps it’s taking to protect users.

For content execs, it’s all about clicks

Today’s brands must consistently deliver tailored, meaningful and relevant communications to customers and prospects alike, but it’s challenging. Find out how eBay used optimized marketing language to increase brand engagement and loyalty.

The news: Twitter finally released its long-anticipated Super Follows feature in the US, letting select creators with at least 10,000 followers charge fans a monthly subscription fee for exclusive content, per a company blog post Thursday.

The news: The UK-based Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) compiled a list of the 157 fintech unicorns to date (those valued over $1 billion), per its blog post. By the numbers: Unsurprisingly, the 81 unicorns in the US are more than in all of the other countries combined. The next fintech hubs are China (11), UK (10), India (9), Brazil (7), and Germany (7).

Per an image in Facebook’s blog post, these ads are apparently embedded within VR experiences, not unlike ads in traditional video games. The addition of targeted ads could help Facebook monetize VR and loosen Oculus’ dependence on Facebook’s more profitable ventures. Despite dominating the consumer VR market, Oculus has yet to truly monetize its growing platform.

The announcement blog post, “It’s Time for Our Industry To Declare #MeasurementIndependence,” calls for exactly that: a future where the media industry operates on a number of independent measurement systems, rather than defaulting to a service like Nielsen.

In late April, work collaboration platform Basecamp published a blog post announcing that it would cut certain benefits, which caused an employee exodus. Google fired employees who protested the company’s decision to work with certain government agencies. It is now facing a trial over those terminations, which allegedly violated labor law.

Ad tech partners like these and others in the mobile app space—most notably, Eric Seufert’s “Mobile Dev Memo” blog—continue to publish detailed blog posts and host educational webinars as they explore the contours and consequences of these policy changes. Chrome Deprecates the Third-Party Tracking Cookie.

Perhaps most significant is the FTC’s blog post this week, published less than 24 hours before the EU announced its proposed reforms, which acknowledges research illustrating how AI tools can reflect and reinforce gender and racial biases, and claimed it would intervene if companies misused AI.

I started a blog on the side, talking about new unlocked phones that were coming out. But then the blog started making more money through advertising than selling phones. So, I shut down the store and started focusing on my blog, which was called TheUnlockr.com. I started using YouTube because I needed a place to host video tutorials.

Importantly, LQDN’s complaint against Amazon centers around “the system of targeted advertising itself,” rather than “occasional security breaches” or other instances where customer data is exposed to third parties, per a blog post by the group. Amazon is not the only company targeted by LQDN: The group also filed complaints against Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

The announcement followed a March 24 blog post, in which Facebook said that much of the increased traffic to its apps in countries hardest hit by the coronavirus came from its messaging services. Voice and video calling on Messenger and WhatsApp, for example, had more than doubled over the previous month.

"Getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways to keep ourselves and our communities healthy in the months ahead," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post. Amazon is not requiring employees to be vaccinated and only enforces mask-wearing for unvaccinated workers.