Life without internet: Tuesday’s Daily Brief

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and there are rumors circulating…

Specifically, that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — which at the time of writing are all suffering an outage — might be down for at least a week. Rumors, I say, not informed speculation. After all, if the root cause is a DNS failure, as Cisco has suggested, that’s a familiar fault that should be resolvable. (Update: Of course, they are all back up and running.)

And of course, there are people too saying they’re gone for good, or that they should be gone for good (especially after the whistleblower allegations on “60 Minutes” on Sunday). To which someone on Twitter responded, forlornly, “I need them to run my business.”

The commercial and emotional dependence on these platforms highlighted by their temporary unavailability makes me think again: What if the internet itself went away? For a day, a week, indefinitely? How would anything work anymore? 

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

What are headless or hybrid content management systems?  

Headless and hybrid content management systems are software that serves as a repository for textual and other digital content that includes an application programming interface (API) that allows that stored content to be distributed to a variety of platforms. “Hybrid” systems have some of the characteristics of headless systems and some of those of “traditional” content management systems.

In this concise guide, learn what headless and hybrid CMSs can do that a traditional CMS like WordPress can’t. The growth of mobile devices, especially, makes delivering content experiences, well synonymous with delivering them quickly. Headless and hybrid content management systems can help marketers in this pursuit by providing a number of benefits.

These include easier delivery of content to new and emerging platforms, not just websites, security and an enhanced ability to reuse and repurpose content, leading to greater ROI. 

Read more here.

Facebook and Instagram outages can affect your social advertising metrics

Facebook and Instagram were down for over two hours yesterday. The outrage resulted in quite a few funny tweets, as Twitter was one of the only social media platforms still up at the time. The error message suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error. Those who used Facebook as a login verification for other apps also could not log in to those third-party systems. The outage isn’t the first for Facebook. The app and websites were down in March and July this year, too. 

Why we care. Make sure to mark the outage in your Analytics if you rely heavily on leads or traffic from social. The outage will have a heavy impact on both paid and organic social media campaigns, but fortunately only for a short period of one day.

Also read: What marketers can do next time a major social network goes down

5 ways to improve on-site search  

Having a website search function is critical to any business’s success. However, many have a difficult time providing customers with relevant search results and gaining actionable insights from the data.

“Site search is a misunderstood capability on our websites,” said Stephen Zakur, CEO at SoloSegment, in his talk at our recent MarTech conference. “As marketers, we often think about listening very closely to our customers, but we do that in kind of obtuse ways. 

Five elements Zakur urges marketers to bring to improving search are: Getting the team on the same page; analyzing the customer experience; automating A/B testing; using machine learning appropriately; and considering a third-party vendor to offer search-as-a-service.

Read more here 

Quote of the day

“Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp still down. Might as well like.. do a jigsaw or something.” Debbie Ioanna, author.