Hello again. We’re back. We’re going to try sending this newsletter out on Tuesdays from now on because we couldn’t find a way to make Fridays work.
Merry Christmas.
Too much has happened this year to catch up on all of it. The wall of a plane fell off, a combination IHOP-Applebees was announced, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that boneless wings can contain bones, U.S. health insurance providers walked back their plans to deny anesthesia claims after the kinetic intervention of a Calvin Klein underwear model, and everyone learned that Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” stores used the same technology as an eighteenth century chess machine called the Mechanical Turk (pictured above).
We’re at a bit of a crossroads here. We should inform you about things like an ongoing spam update or the fact that Google’s newest crawler documentation specifies a preference for ETags for the first time. You can click those links to brush up if you like. We’d rather show off a new feature we recently released.
You’ve no doubt seen our reviews dashboard if you have an active Local Viking or Local Brand Manager subscription (you must be logged into LV or LBM for those links to work). You can choose to look at reviews for all of your managed locations or zero in on one location at a time. You can also write your own review replies or let our OpenAI integration do it for you. You need an OpenAI API key to use that feature, so check out Gen’s instructions if you need help getting one.
We’ve got more new features that make use of OpenAI. We’ll save them for next week. For now, we’ll get into our closing links.
We dare not link to one of the many websites that allow you to place wagers on the upcoming fate of TikTok (our Mailchimp account once got suspended for making a joke about a Super Bowl prop bet), but those sites exist and they’re easy to find, even using a search engine that obfuscates information as badly as Google does these days. While we’re on the subject of TikTok, check out its report on the best performing content of 2024. Next, we think you’ll enjoy a late November New York Times article about the many possible fates that may get imposed on Google as a result of their recent antitrust conviction. Finally, you should take a look at Hootsuite’s 2025 guide to Pinterest marketing.
We’ll get another newsletter to you on New Year’s Eve. Take care of yourselves during the holidays.