It’s been a week y’all. I went into the week thinking, “oh this is gonna be an easy one; it’s the end of the month, client meetings are sparse, my to-do list seems manageable.” Boy was I wrong. Seemingly from the ether I had meetings and to-do’s up to my eyeballs and I wasn’t alone. I’m fairly certain that everyone on team ONeil had a doozy of a week. Maybe it’s the metaverse in retrograde or something.
Also, after spending the better part of last weekend with 7 13 year old girls, I thought this weekend would be one in which I could relax and be a little selfish. My children had other plans. Each of them has a social event tonight, tomorrow night, and Sunday night as well as at least one day time event apiece. The cliche is true, the days are long but the years are short.
Lexi Jo continues to kick my tush. Reminding me daily why I only have two kids. Babies, of the human or fur variety are exhausting.
Turns out we weren’t the only ones walloped this week! Google had a tough week and while I don’t necessarily think of the announcement of Meta as a wallop, it didn’t exactly receive positive praise which is why I suspect two rather big announcements came out of Instagram this week. Housing is still trying to sort itself out. Speaking of housing, did you catch Homefiniti and Beyond last Friday? If not, it lives on to watch and there’s a recap on the blog.
METAVERSE
I’m sorry but every time I hear the talk about the metaverse all I think about is Flash and Arrow and that whole CW tv series. Seems that isn’t so much the case for Zuck. He’s gone and renamed his whole company Meta, under which, Facebook, Instagram, What’s App, Oculus and more now live. This was met with a mixed bag of reactions.
Seemingly to offset this announcement, Instagram made moves of its own that were most definitely met with praise. First, early in the week they finally decided to let us publish to Instagram from the desktop interface. Halla-freakin-lujah! What took them so long to do this I will never know. Then a day later they made huge waves by blessing all the accounts in Instagram land with the ability to share links in stories through the new link sticker. Now everyone is free to be an influencer!
In all seriousness both moves are extremely helpful to business accounts, first of all, sharing links back to your content is huge and should be used ASAP, link in bio no more! Second, sharing straight from the desktop where all of us professional marketers spend our free time, simplifies things considerably. And yes, I know I can do the same thing from Creator Studio in the business suite but still, posting natively just feels better.
UH OH GOOGLE
Turns out Google takes a rather large percentage of advertisers money; more money than it’s rivals, and more than many suspected. It also turns out that Google and Facebook banded together to box out competition and drive up prices. Yeah, not a good look for either company. Both of these pieces of info come from records that were unsealed in a lawsuit against Google lead by the state of Texas and supported by 15 other states as well as the Commonwealth of Kentucky. So not cool Google and Facebook.
HOUSING TEA LEAVES
Each week I comb through the housing news to try to distill out any patterns or confirm/ deny instances that I see in our data. This week brought me a mixed bag of results. Two articles showing new home growth and one showing a cooling desire for homeownership. What does it all mean? Personally, I think it means that the market is continuing to try to find its way back to “normal” when there are still more than a few obstacles in its way. On the positive side, there was a 14% ise in the number of newly built homes in September and the pending new home sales index also rose by 6.9%. Both solid indicators of growth. The problem is that prices continue to rise as do mortgage rates so it’s near impossible for the market to solidify into something we can use to forecast with certainty towards the future.
This week I’ll leave behind the chaos and uncertainty; I’ll take the good housing news, the Instagram improvements and the fact that Lexi has not had a kennel accident in two nights and use that to refocus on the good stuff. After all, my birthday’s next Friday so it’s got to be good news from here on out!
