Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 69 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Friday Five
I. ChatGPT is Getting a Memory
II. Instagram Adds Feature; Polite Revolt Ensues
III. New on GA4: Trends Change Detection
IV. TikTok’s Attempt To Tame Election Misinformation
V. X Working on Grok-ing Up Trending Topics
VI. Other Important Updates
I. ChatGPT is Getting a Memory
We’re testing the ability for ChatGPT to remember things you discuss to make future chats more helpful. You’re in control of ChatGPT’s memory.
You're in control of ChatGPT's memory. You can explicitly tell it to remember something, ask it what it remembers, and tell it to forget conversationally or through settings. You can also turn it off entirely.
-OpenAI
The feature has been rolled out to a limited number of free and Plus users this week.
“You can also view and delete specific memories or clear all memories in settings.” How can I get this feature IRL?
Custom GPTs will have “memories,” too. (But not yet.)
🛠 Why does this matter?
“Remembering things you discuss across all chats saves you from having to repeat information and makes future conversations more helpful.” -OpenAI
User beware: “We may use content that you provide to ChatGPT, including memories, to improve our models for everyone.” You can turn this off, though.
Per the examples in the blog post, this sounds like a useful feature. I don’t know how many times I have told ChatGPT not to use the Oxford comma (sue me!) and it still does.
This will be particularly useful for repetitive tasks or content formats. We’ll be sure to save lots of time (and frustration) by not having to say the same thing every time we open a new chat.
In the meantime (and even when this feature comes to you), don’t forget about custom instructions to increase conversation efficiency.
•
II. Instagram Adds Feature; Polite Revolt Ensues
“What we’re adding is a filter for people you follow,” said Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, referring to a new way content creators can sort their DMs. “Sometimes you just want to focus the experience on people you know.”
After explaining a few other existing features, and talking about how it would improve user safety, he then said this:
“So let me know down below in these comments what you think of these features.”
These are just a sampling of the responses:
As he often does, Mosseri signed off his video holding up two fingers as he said “Peace.”
🛠 Why does this matter?
Years ago, Facebook dumped cold water on a huge traffic source for content creators by prioritizing paid content and suppressing the reach of organic posts.
Instagram – owned by Meta, as Facebook is – began doing the same in the last couple years. As you can see from the comments, users are still feeling the pain.
Mosseri said he hoped this would make the creator experience “a little more positive for you.” His use of “little” indicates self-awareness around the paltry value this brings to Instagram’s core users.
Being able to filter messages is a nice bell to put on the metaphorical bike of social media, but what the people want is air in their tires.
•
III. New on GA4: Trends Change Detection
Trend change detection is a new type of insight that surfaces subtle but long-lasting and important changes in the direction of your data. It's similar to anomaly detection in that they both detect a change in data. The main difference is that anomaly detection highlights sudden spikes or dips in data, while trend change detection highlights more subtle changes over a longer period of time.
Google Analytics displays these changes in an Insight card in the Insights & recommendations section of the Home page, in Reports snapshot and Advertising snapshot, and in the Insights hub.
🛠 Why does this matter?
GA4’s “insights” features – that search bar at the top of your dashboard is another example – are meant to give you, well, insights that you might not have picked up on yourself.
Consider these pattern detections as possible signals for deeper investigation.
Example: You’re using the sign_up event for newsletter signups. GA4 insights detects a spike in that event. What should you do? A couple ideas: Create a report for sign_up events and…
break it down by source / medium. Perhaps there’s a particular referrer that drives a high amount of subscriptions.
break it down by page path + query string. If you have newsletter signup modules on many different pages, this will show you whether there’s a particular page driving the lion’s share of signups.
These are just a few examples. The good news? These insights are automatic, so all you have to do is look out for them.
Caveat: If you have low-volume traffic, your site/app may not reach the threshold for “insights.” If that’s the case, you’ll see a notification in your dashboard.
•
IV. TikTok’s Attempt To Tame Election Misinformation
More than 134m people across Europe* come to TikTok every month, many of whom will vote in the forthcoming European elections. Next month, we will launch a local language Election Centre in-app for each of the 27 individual EU Member States to ensure people can easily separate fact from fiction.
Tik will work with nine fact-checkers to verify content accuracy.
Other investments:
Implementing enhanced media literacy campaigns to educate users.
Strengthening measures against misinformation and covert operations.
Tailoring approaches for politician and media accounts to ensure election integrity.
🛠 Why does this matter?
This is almost certainly a dry run for what promises to be a chaotic U.S. election in November.
President Biden recently launched an account
On the surface level, this demonstrates TikTok's commitment to safeguarding democratic processes.
Depending on how things go with content in Europe, this could significantly hurt or harm journalists’s trust in TikTok’s ability to monitor misinformation – in November and beyond.
•
V. X Working on Grok-ing Up Trending Topics
Great, but Grok is paid-only: “Premium+ subscribers can now use our most advanced AI, Grok, on X.” -X
-X
🛠 Why does this matter?
The current Explore topics don’t offer users much context without clicking through:
(Not to mention they’re poorly customized, as I’m neither a Ducks nor a Senators fan.)
Grok-ifying this tab could give more context to why something is trending without needing to click through. But…
…since Grok is a premium product, would this only be available for premium users? That remains to be seen.
•
VI. Other Important Updates
Creator Targeting: a powerful new way for advertisers to connect on X
More Than ‘1,000 incredible spatial apps [have been] designed specifically for Vision Pro’ (Plus more than 1.5 million compatible ones)
“Thanks to our evolving machine learning algorithms, we blocked or removed over 170 million policy-violating reviews from this year — over 45% more than in 2022. More than 12 million fake business profiles were removed or blocked too.”
-Google
•
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Gerick News(letter) to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.