Hi, Vikings and other internet users. Our busy Friday trend continues. We used to have a few hours set aside to research and write this newsletter, but more and more tasks have crept into that time slot over the past year or so. We’ve kicked around the idea of changing the day of the week this email goes out, but nothing has come of that yet. We’ll keep you informed.
Many of you use Slack for messaging at your agencies. We use it at Local Viking too. Those of you with free plans should know that you’ve got two months before Slack will begin removing all messages and files that were posted more than a year earlier. So, once the new policy goes into effect on August 26, all communications from the date your server launched through August 26, 2023 will get irrecoverably erased. As time moves along, you’ll continue losing chat history from a year earlier.
Slack’s current retention policy says that all messages, lists, files, and canvases (a feature we’ve never used and are not familiar with) are saved for the lifetime of your workspace. That policy will remain in place for workspaces on the Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans (the three tiers that have monthly costs). If you’re at risk of losing documentation or critical chat history because you currently use a free Slack workspace, the good news is that you have ways to export your chat history. This help page on Slack’s website explains how to do just that.
We’d also like to remind you that you now have less than three days to transition from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 if you haven’t yet done so. You will lose access to UA on July 1.
If you’re fully entrenched in the world of UA, you should know that GA4 isn’t so bad. They’re adding lots of new features by the day. They introduced Realtime Reports and acquisition reporting just this week. The Realtime feature lets you watch activity on your app or website as it’s happening, getting so granular as to show you user-by-user activity “in the last five minutes.” The acquisition reporting allows you to designate key events in site navigation, so you can see things like the links site visitors clicked before adding an item to their shopping carts.
We really are pressed for time today, so we will jump right into today’s closing links. We’re looking at a three-day work week for the next newsletter, so we’ll be sure to give it some love with the extra time we’ll have available.
We’ve got a doozy for today’s first closing link. It’s a podcast from the beginning of this month that features an interview of Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom. It’s conducted by Nilay Patel, the man who has been the editor-in-chief of The Verge for the past ten years. Everything about this interview is off-the-walls crazy. Everything. Eric does not think AI is currently reliable enough to handle interpersonal meetings, but he sees a world in five-six years where AI clones will be able to stand in for you on work calls, read (and reply to) your emails, and generally handle 90% of your workload. He also sees a world where you can also tweak the characteristics of your AI clones, like making one a better salesman. You can also increase your clone’s empathy for situations that call for it (maybe you need to fire one of your employees for sending an AI clone to a meeting, for example). Anyway, it’s a wild ride and a peek into the stupidest future imaginable. The fact that we’re devoting an entire paragraph to a single link should indicate the fact that we got a kick out of this interview. We think you will too.
Next up, we’ve got an article from Vox that shines a light on why so many successful athletes seem to find themselves partnering with Subway at some point in their careers. Our third link comes from later.com, and it’s an explanation of their social media content strategy. Their social media management tips are likely applicable to almost everyone reading this newsletter. If any of you have a LinkedIn presence, this link from Buffer advocates the seven best tools for increasing the quality of the content you post there. They cite their own tool as the best one (surprise, surprise), but the rest of the list is full of credible entries. To finish things up, Search Engine Journal published an article on Tuesday called How To Leverage Trust To Boost Your International Expansion. It’s an eight-minute read and full of valuable insights for anyone looking abroad to increase their customer base.
Have a great weekend, everyone. We plan to tell you about a new Local Viking feature next week. Take care of yourselves out there.