WooCommerce AI, Accessibility, Security and Privacy in 2024

Robbie (00:00):
Hello and welcome to Do the Woo. My name is Robbie Adair. I’m with OSTraining, and today we’re doing an agency chat. Do the Woo. And I have my co-host here, my partner in crime, Robert Jacobi. Robert, happy New Year.

Robert (00:15):
It’s Happy New Year. It’s a brand new year. No crimes have been committed yet

Robbie (00:20):
Because we’ve only a couple of days in, no, well actually more than that, but you still got time. Don’t worry, Robert, you can make January. I know you can. So today actually, Robert and I are just going to be chatting. We’re going to be chatting about what we are thinking about 20, 24 and what we think will be kind of some of the hot topics that are going to come up this year and things that we’re going to predict some things we’re not going by what was already predicted by everyone. This is just our take on it. So goodness knows what this could be about. Probably coffee.

Robert (00:55):
I’d like to think that we’re, we’re going to drive agencies to new growth and spectacular success by what we say in the next 25 minutes.

Robbie (01:04):
Wow. No pressure. No pressure at all or not. Yes. No. So seriously, I mean, you work with agencies. I also own an agency, not just my training company. So yeah, agencies, what are we thinking about this year? And a lot of agencies try to, the founders, the leadership, try to gather together in December and think about the new year. But we’ve all been so busy since the pandemic. I feel like it has been very difficult to have those little planning sessions. And so a lot of times now I find I do my planning session the first week of the new year, not the end of last year.

Robert (01:46):
And honestly, so we can prepare everyone for 2025. Those planning sessions should be starting in October and November because by the time you get all the stakeholders in place, thinking about the next year, you really don’t want to be two weeks into January thinking about, oh my gosh, we got to do, what’s our plan? What’s our marketing plan? What’s our strategy? Who are we looking at from a vertical basis? Where did we succeed last year and how do we want to take advantage of that kind of market? And what other markets can we explore?

Robbie (02:28):
Exactly. And it’s the planning of the marketing is only part of it to me because also as an agency owner, the other thing that I always try to do every year is review all of my tools and subscriptions and things like that that I’ve got. You’ve all got these handful of tools that you use every day, but then you also have all these tools that you bought going, I’m going to use that. And then you got busy, you didn’t, or maybe you really did, and it became one of those vital tools, but you have to keep looking. And now I feel like that’s even harder because we have so many new tools. AI has exploded in the last couple of years here and it’s exploded into all of these different tool sets that we’re looking at as agency owners. And so I usually would review most of the tools, but I found myself having to send that over to some of the team members and I would just be like, this looks awesome, but I don’t even have time to set up a trial account. I want you to do it and then report back and tell me. And so I mean, there’s just so many tools now to look at. It’s crazy.

Robert (03:33):
The AR I floodgates are ridiculously wide open. And if you’re in WordPress or SaaS or open source, obviously WooCommerce, everyone has solutions. Like we’re empowered, super charged by blah, blah, blah by ai. And ironically because over the holidays it’s been fun to play with a lot. You could probably do a lot of that and then have your own suite of services without having 3000 subscriptions. Anything from $5 to a hundred thousand a month with chat GT four and the ability to create your own. Oh my gosh, that’s crazy Cool. I mean, just from a little geeky perspective, like, oh, so I can upload a whole bunch of documents, whole bunch of code whatnot, and say, rewrite this all for this kind of client or even go to LinkedIn, get that client’s profile and put that in as a document that for your special proposal generator, there’s some cool stuff in there that you really don’t need a lot of SaaS providers for. I mean, I’m not going to poo them, but I mean the tools built into just open AI are quite amazing. And I think if you haven’t looked at it by the end of last year, you have to look at it this year.

Robbie (05:10):
Oh, 100%. If you do not have a chat GPT account, stop listening to this right now. Just stop listening to it and go set up your account. I mean, literally, it’s that important. It’s that important. Even if you don’t find a way to use it in your day-to-day task, it is that important that you understand it and you know what your clients are doing. I can guarantee you they probably are using it too.

Robert (05:31):
To your point about tools, it’s not just what you’re using. It’s knowing what’s out there. And like you just said, your competitors might be using those tools and it can be anything from workflow to testing automation to ai, of course, and so on and so forth.

Robbie (05:49):
I actually have, one of my good clients is out at CES and looking, there’s an AI device that I want to buy, and I’ve started to go ahead and buy it, but I was like, wait, my client’s going to be at CES. I’m going to having just scope it out and see if they’ve got a discount coupon. They’re always good about that at CES. And so I was like, I’ll just see if they have a discount and if not, I’ll order it afterwards at full price. But anyway, they’re such cool stuff now to me, I like that you’re starting to see AI pulled into your tools that you use anyway. And I find that those little pointed uses of AI are going to be where I think most people find the most value because it’s built into what they’re already using. I’ll use, I’ll just use Elementor as an example right now.

(06:34):
So they’ve started putting in little pieces of AI throughout, but it’s very pointed. It does one little purpose so people don’t get lost. I will say that is the problem with some people who go into just ChatGPT, and they’re just like, I don’t even know what to do. I don’t know. They don’t know how to hone it in. And so they’re getting a lot of the hallucinations and things and they’re like, oh, this doesn’t work. But when you start pointing AI into very specific niche purposes or like you said, making your custom ChatGPT, then you find much more value out of it, I feel like. And so it’s going to be interesting to just see where all the tools are coming in. And I think for Woo, this is going to be a huge thing because ai, to me, one of the big beauties of AI is that it handles large data sets so much faster than we can. And so that’s where I find that we’re going to see in large e-commerce stores and things, this is going to be an invaluable tool for even if it’s nothing more than I want to go through and do comparisons on data sets, or I want to do enhancements on a certain column in a dataset because it can do it so quickly. That’s where we’re going to see the speed improvement for e-commerce.

Robert (07:47):
And I think the smart agencies will be bundling in AI research for their customers, how to make the e-commerce journey stronger, faster, smarter, everything. And you can do that with looking at your immediate customers portfolio of products, solutions, services, comparing them to your top three direct competitors, a little legwork, throw it all in a spreadsheet, and then you upload your spreadsheet to open ai and it’s just like, okay, we figured out where the connections are so you don’t have to spend a week doing it on your own. Building your own GPTs has kind of blown me away as a use case because you can really focus in on your niche, your specialties, your market, and create your own content that only you can use. So again, it’s not necessarily going out to the rest of the world. So yes, there can be OSS training specific content that you put in there and get responses back from this weird cloud genius.

Robbie (09:05):
Well, I’m not going to say that we are working on something, but we might be. I mean, when you’re talking about ours is a lot of video content, so it’s mainly video content, but every video has a transcript. Now, transcripts, if you don’t have your transcript done yet, some of these AI tools that are doing the transcripts are way better than just the auto transcript that we’ve seen on YouTube, which was kind of the defacto, a lot of us use that one. It was free. It was probably one of the better ones out there. But now with the AI tools, holy mackerel, some of these AI tools are just amazing with their transcription. I’m surprised they know certain words. And so it’s using that AI knowledge of listening to the content of what people are talking about to know which spelling of a certain word they really meant. And so it’s really improved those drastically. So now you can get content in air quotes there out of all your video to then put in a custom GPT to say, Hey, I want to search. I’m looking how to do this. And it looks and goes, oh, well, this video in this video series shows you how to do that. And so actually it’s speeding up the time that it takes us to do those type of things now to get transcriptions and such.

Robert (10:20):
Oh, and let’s be really crazy. And now you can have it in Swahili, Japanese, German, Spanish, all within 30 minutes.

Robbie (10:33):
Yes, absolutely. And that happens for everything that you want to do too. So if you want to also do social media posts in all of those different languages, mixing this all together, we say, oh, we have a store in Woo and we want to do social media posts. We want to feature different products in our posts that are out there. Well, now I can do a very quick data dump, mix that in and say, here’s the links, here’s the descriptions. And it can then go and say, okay, I’ve written 150 posts for you now, and it can even schedule them for you if you want. I mean, now here’s the thing I will say, I speak about AI at a lot of events too, and this is the first thing I’m going to tell everyone is please check the work the AI produces. Please just check it. It’s not going to be perfect. It’s just that it’s going to speed your time up. All you’re doing is checking afterwards and maybe making some changes. You’ll find things that are incorrect or you’ll think, well, this would be better this way because it is getting better at mimicking voices, meaning you have a certain voice for your e-commerce store and maybe it’s fun and lively, and that’s voice, a

Robert (11:47):
Voice, not audio voice, but voice of how you write things. Yes. I just want to make that clear for everyone.

Robbie (11:55):
Yes, yes. Thank you. Yes, your brand voice. Exactly. The brand voice. It’s getting very good at trying to learn a brand voice and mimic it back, which is nice. And you’re even seeing like Canva, people use Canva all the time for this. The AI tools that Canvas brought in are actually very helpful, even if it’s as simple as change the format. This is an Instagram square and I want to make it horizontal to put on my Facebook cover. It can actually manipulate that graphic for you and change it for you. So this is saving time.

Robert (12:29):
So total tangent, and I’m so glad we don’t even try to prepare for these things. You and I both come from the JUMELA world, which was very, I would almost say multilingual first.

Robbie (12:47):
Yes.

Robert (12:48):
Part of the Gutenberg plan. So phase four is to add multilingual. Can we just skip that whole thing by implementing good ai?

Robbie (13:05):
Well, I do think that ai, we’re going to see AI is going to speed up the process of multilingual for a lot of people out there, for companies, for even websites. And we’re seeing it in video as well. So I mean, just like we had a great example at State of the Word, they were recorded Josepha in English, and then they translated it to Spanish and she looked like she was speaking Spanish fluently. You can tell, still tell when they’ve manipulated those videos. You can, but it’s getting better and it’s getting much, much better, and you’re going to see it get even better over the next few years.

Robert (13:45):
It’s a lot better than the Godzilla movies from 1978. Yes, I’m dating myself, but where the lips don’t even have any chance of catching up with the content.

Robbie (13:57):
Correct, but it is going to open doors for us. Now, of course, I always tell people, I’m like, multilingual is great if you have a need for multilingual, but otherwise you might be getting yourself into trouble if you’re just trying to be, I’m going to just put everything out there in five languages. But if you really don’t have a need for it, as well as you don’t have, even if you use AI to translate, you need a real translator to double check these things, please. Because you can really get yourself in just using automated tools for translation. So you do need a native speaker.

Robert (14:25):
I’m just thinking of all the hard work that went into creating an infrastructure in Jula that could be actually completely skipped in WordPress and WooCommerce by using tools that are trained really well versus actually making sure you have extra tables, extra rows, extra columns, all this stuff. Which 20 years ago, 25. Wow, 25 years ago. What year is it? Oh my gosh, I’m going to go 20 years ago. That just makes me feel slightly better. But 20 years ago, that was a ton of hard work to make sure that content across a website could be tagged as there are additional languages that are associated with this piece of content. I’ll make a crazy prediction that phase four of Gutenberg with multilingual will never happen because AI will beat Gutenberg to the punch.

Robbie (15:28):
Interesting. Well, that would save a lot of people, a lot of work, so that would be great. Then they could add a different phase four on and they could still improve things. They could just do something different. You’re right. Well, that would be really cool. Well, I like that prediction there, Robert. And I bet you there’s a lot of people there hoping you are correct. That would save ’em a lot of time.

So let’s talk about some other things that we know. We’ve seen it growing over the last few years, which is accessibility. It has become a hotter and hotter topic. Europe hit first. I will say they really got crunched down on it before we did, but it’s happening here. Last year we saw so many laws in the US being proposed or passed, and there’s so many more. So what are your predictions on accessibility this year, Robert?

Robert (16:41):
I have an acronym for 2024. assp like the snake. It’ll bite you in your ass if you don’t get it done. It’s accessibility, security, and privacy.

Robbie (16:53):
Oh, there you go. I like it asp. All right. Well, that’s good. Yeah, cover your aspa this year. I like it.

Robert (16:58):
Sorry, Bob. Do the, will we get in trouble for using three or four letter words?

Robbie (17:05):
Well, no, I think that’s fantastic advice for people because you’re right, accessibility, we know it’s important. We know we’re starting to see more lawsuits happen, we’re seeing more laws passed, and so this is going to be a ongoing battle, is what I’ll call it for people to get their accessibility in order. You probably, you just like me, talked to Bette or Amber. These are our accessibility experts that we see out there, and they’ve been saying this for years, so I’ll give ’em that. They’ve been telling us for years, we need to get prepared. But I find also both of them are proposing some really cool ideas that agencies can start grasping onto. There’s tools. Amber’s company has a tool out there. And then you also have, I think Bet’s company is offering a monthly service. So there’s some accessibility answers out there for agencies without the agency having to become the accessibility expert, I feel like.

And that’s where, again, these tool sets that we’re seeing, they have to be examined by the agencies and they need to pick what they’re going to do and how they’re going to guide their clients through this accessibility mess. And I call it a mess because I still say years and years ago when we made the decision to not make XML required in our code base in HTML, that I think we made a big, big mistake and we’ve made everything more difficult for us, accessibility, searching, things like that. Whereas had, when we had HTML one and we had XML one, if we had had just said, we’re going to make people use XML so that their code is more proper, and it actually describes the content in there, it would’ve solved all this. But there you go. That was me years ago. That was my prediction that XML was going to be required so that we could have very structured data on the web. I lost that prediction

Robert (19:03):
You in that semantic web nonsense. How dare you.

Robbie (19:08):
I know semantics. Imagine if when I have the word jaws in a H1, if instead of it just being H1 jaws, it was like the XML proper where it had type movie. I mean, hello. It was such a simple solution to make all of our lives easier now, but we didn’t go down that path. So here we are now, we’re having to reverse engineer XML descriptors in and things like that.

Robert (19:34):
So for our Woo agency listeners, yeah, tag your content correctly, whether it’s XML or whatnot, the semantic web lives, most importantly at the search engine universe, Google cares about defining and explaining your semantic content. So whether there’s a standard or not, do it like you would for accessibility. And this is the irony of accessibility. Not only does it help folks who can’t access the internet as easily as they should, but it actually makes the quality of content on the internet better. So Amber Hinds, Bet Hannon in the WordPress space, WooCommerce space are doing tons of awesome work to make that happen.

Robbie (20:33):
Absolutely. And at this point, Robert, you mentioned, yes, it’s not only is it good for the accessibility tools that people have to use to read things properly to them and all that, but it also affects the way search engines list you. It also affects the way these AI bots are reading your content and then giving back information about it in AI tools. I mean, why do you think we’re having hallucinations? Because hey, it doesn’t know, it says jaws. It could be about my jaws. It could be about your jaws, it could be about shark. We don’t know. And so I do think that we’re going to have to be more structured in our data just because of the AI tools that are out there, as well as I think we’re going to have some new code pieces that we’re going to be using that are also guides for these AI bots. They’re going to be telling it, don’t list this, do list this. If you list this, you need to give credit for this. We’re going to start seeing some of those tags coming into play, I think.

Robert (21:53):
So prediction number two. Prediction number one again was what’s going to be Gutenberg phase four since AI’s going to take over multilingual prediction number two is, oh my God, I just lost my train of thought.

Robbie (22:13):
Everyone out, there’s hanging on with bated breath.

Robert (22:16):
I know. I like to pump up the audience. It’s like I’m opening for Robbie er. Prediction number two is when you get data from your customers as a Woo agency, put it into XML spreadsheet something format, independent of the tool you’re going to deploy into, because then you can repurpose it for social media, for the actual WooCommerce website, for blog content, whatever. If the, how do I not say something bad about word WooCommerce when I really don’t want to say it. WooCommerce is not going to support that kind of structured data out of the box as an agency. Create your own structured data infrastructure so you can repurpose that data across all these tools. WooCommerce being the most important, social media ai. Again, you have your structured data internally, you can have that translated internally, then have a professional double check it and whatnot, and you’re good to go. So Matt Wig talked about at the state of the word in 2023 is about sort liberating data. This is one way you can do it right now without a giant open source infrastructure to make it happen. It is just have best practices internally as an agency to collect the data from your customers.

Robbie (24:01):
We do WordPress and WooCommerce and our agency. We also do Laravel though. We’ve done jumela in the past. So we work in various open source solutions for web and web applications. But we normally encourage the client to define when we start working with them, where is the source of truth for your data? There should always be a source of truth for your data. And sometimes, I mean, I could see how if you’re just a web store, your source of truth could be your WooCommerce data. But that even then, I would encourage them to not do that. We always will encourage people to let us put together a little data management Laravel app or something somewhere where you can have your data properly structured. You have a place where people can maintain it. You have a place where you can API, because you probably also want to, A lot of our clients have warehouses or manufacturing facilities. So this data about your products lives in a lot of places. And I do realize some people don’t have that. They’re just a web store and they just have their products listed in there. But many companies, they’re using that product data in multiple uses. And so having one place though that you could say is your source of truth and then you pull into your Woo to me is always the much better solution. Always.

Robert (25:20):
So you kind of said there, you need that single source of truth to be able to repurpose it. And data liberation again is sort of the Matt’s WordPress. That’s the biggest thing I took from state of the word is data liberation. I’m a data dork. I love it. So how can we take advantage of it? And worst case, you created sort of a liberated data environment at your agency so you can repurpose that content across whatever it is. Exactly. If in the S of security, it’s also sharing how can we as open source WooCommerce folk, take advantage of the sharing environment of content, because that’s just going to drive revenue. If you can get your products out to the right places, if you want your products out at the major news sources, obviously depends on the product, but let’s go geeky products like the Verge, they’re going to expect some kind of XML feed. So you can customize those feeds much more easily if you own the entire content. Single source of truth.

Robbie (26:43):
Exactly. You can control that. Yes, absolutely. We’ve been doing it for years with our clients. Even, like I said, years ago when we were building most of our stuff in jula, we still always encourage the client to have somewhere else where we had their data set up as a source of truth that we can access and pull over to the site. They could access and pull over into their systems, or sometimes they already had a source of truth, and that source of truth was in an internal system, but we always then encouraged to have an outlet, almost like a redundancy that we attach to the website versus attaching directly into their systems.

Robert (27:22):
And that’s why you’re the A team in agencies.

Robbie (27:26):
Yes, exactly. We love data. That’s why. No, I always the I love it when a plan comes together.

But anyway, so let’s talk about your S. Let’s talk about security. Oh my gosh, security. I tell you. Oh, it’s like always the thorn in the agency side is making sure you try to do everything you can to be as secure as you can, but there’s always something that gets through, I feel like. But for agencies particularly, I feel like smaller agencies are just starting out. I think that some of these things like security, it is harder for them to start getting to that point where they’re thinking about it immediately because maybe they have smaller teams or whatever. And so they do need to be looking at this though, because the amount of attacks is up. You probably know better than me because you’re more in that hosting world and security world. So it’s amazing though, the percentages that I’ve seen out there, it is crazy how much more DDoS attacks and bots that are out there that are mining information and things like that.

Robert (28:36):
I mean, security is that awful boring thing, like running payroll. And most agencies are not interested in running their own payroll. They’re using a third party service. Most agencies aren’t all over the top of security. And how can you be? It changes every what, 36 hours. Here’s your zero day WordPress threat. And folks like Patch Stack and Wordfence do amazing jobs of keeping up the WordPress and WOO community, WooCommerce community up to date on what’s going on. And there’s a ton of third party services that hosting providers have. So make sure you’re utilizing those services from your hosting companies. Yeah, it’s going to cost you an extra couple bucks a month for a site, and how many hours will it take to resolve DNS, some kind of bot spoofing, all the crazy stuff that goes on. There are even new companies like Bot Guard out there that just focus on specific types of attacks. And just being aware and sort of just outsourcing security I think is a huge advantage. Especially like you just said, new agency startups, you’re not going to have the time or resources to deal with that nonsense.

Robbie (30:08):
Exactly. You’re not. And it was years, I feel like in the making with our agency too, before I really felt confident in going into a client saying, yes, we have some good security protocols that we can put in place here, and these are tools that we can use to protect your site. I mean, obviously we can’t ever guarantee a hundred percent, but if you’re stacking up a bunch of tools that might help with this, like you said, you’ve got, most of the hosting companies now do offer, or at least they’ve got a partnership with a secure or a CloudFlare or something like that. And now your company that you’re talking about, their bot guard, that’s more, I’m assuming they’re more of actually protecting against the bots, whereas Cloudflare’s going to be more of a DDoS attack, or is it similar? Both of those are similar type defense mechanisms.

Robert (31:01):
I mean, there are so many different types of attacks. It’s making sure that you can mitigate each one as best you can. Obviously you want to push out, first of all, if you’re an e-commerce site and you’re not dealing with some kind of edge caching, well, you’re already asking for a world to hurt, just you want your content will perform better. But also a lot of these edge caching services, CloudFlare obviously being the biggest one, will take care of some of those denial of service attacks. But then you got to look out for the sneaky little guys. That’s right. Sneaky little guys. That’s what I said. Who are using bots to take up all your inventory, to buy up all your tickets, all that kind of weird stuff. So we start to, I think agencies as a whole need to start thinking about what are the other ways that their e-commerce WooCommerce customers can be impacted by bad actors.

Robbie (32:09):
Yeah, and that’s so funny you mentioned that. Okay, so I knew a guy who had a little script that he ran, a bot, and he could go out and buy up front row Saline Dion tickets, and he just sent this bot out and he would grab what he could, and then he resell ’em, obviously. And also he was into those really expensive, crazy custom tennis shoes or whatever. I don’t know, the tennis shoe thing, I don’t understand it.

Robert (32:36):
They’re not tennis shoes. They’re kicks even. That probably dates me. They’re not probably

Robbie (32:39):
Anymore. Oh, my kicks. I was going to say, dude, it’s not the seventies anymore. Oh my gosh. Kicks and probably tennis shoes is old too. Now. They’re probably something else. I don’t know, sneakers, I don’t know, whatever. Anyway, get a little bought and it would go out and it would buy it up. Well, and even during covid, you had people were creating little bots. They would go in and get you your covid vaccine appointment. It was so hard to find them. And it was like people were running this bot, and one of my friends was like, oh, my friend got me an appointment with a bot and it was like, oh, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I just can’t do it inside of my own soul.

Robert (33:22):
But what does that do? Your brand, if you’re that really cool independent seller of something and all of a sudden your brand is being hijacked by global bots.

Robbie (33:34):
Well, and these brands we’re like Walgreens and CVS and Kroger’s, and it was all of the big brands that were running those crazy little schedulers that they threw up overnight. They didn’t have these. Right. And so it was a brand new piece of software. They hadn’t tested anything, definitely hadn’t secured it for bots. And yeah, a lot of ’em, it took ’em down because there was so much activity hitting them at one time. It was like a DDoS attack from bots and then others, it was just like they just couldn’t even, their own employees couldn’t even go in and book people and it was crazy. So yeah, I think we will probably see even more that I actually just sent this last week. I was sending some reports to clients. They’re just their kind of overall basic reporting, how much traffic they had, how much of that traffic was bots. And I had one client, literally 10% of their traffic were bots this last month. I don’t know what happened. They don’t normally have that type of activity, but it was crazy. I was like, whoa, what happened? I don’t know. They must’ve just been on somebody’s target or maybe it was some content that they put up that really attracted them. I don’t know. But it was a lot. 10%.

Robert (34:42):
Give me 30 seconds. I’ll have OpenAI make me a bot to, I mean, that’s the thing. I mean, these tools speed up everything. So bot mitigation with services like Bogar or whoever else, they become more important because anyone can just be like, dear ChatGPT, I would like to buy a bunch of shoes from Robbie’s house. Her website address is blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, blah. And what would be the best way to set up the code to make this happen in WordPress? So you could actually have a WordPress plugin created that if you hack WordPress sites could start being a Robbie’s shoe shopper bot.

Robbie (35:29):
Yes. Okay. So we did not just tell everyone on the internet that they could go make a malicious bot with chat, bt, but he might’ve.

Robert (35:39):
Okay, that is, that’s months delayed. This shouldn’t be a spoiler for anyone because people have been creating,

Robbie (35:47):
I know they’ve been doing it all sort. Oh, I know. Oh no, it’s crazy. No, you’re right. I mean, they’ve been using it for all kinds of malicious activities, so I just thought that was funny. I was like, oh no, let’s stop those bots.

Robert (35:58):
I broke the internet today. Thank you. Yes,

Robbie (36:00):
Yes. Robert broke the internet and we’re done. Okay, so let’s talk about the last letter of your asp, which is privacy. And I’m glad you brought that up. I mean, even that’s one of the last things I think about, and again, I think it’s because that’s all it’s heavy hitters right now in Europe that are all about the privacy, right? That GDPR really is really what it was about. And we’re starting to see it happening here though. California’s always going to be our leader in the country for these type of laws. So you are having to kind of keep your eyes open on it, but what do you foresee that we’re going to have to do this year for privacy, Robert,

Robert (36:39):
Figure out how to live without tracking cookies. I mean, Google has been talking about for a while that they’re going to change how they do Google tracking via cookies. GDPR. It should be, for the most of us, a done deal. Next is Data Protection Act. So how do we, whereas GDPR said, these are the standards for what you can and can’t do with Citizens Data protection is taking it one step further about, well, you really just so you didn’t, I’m going to paraphrase horribly. I’m not a lawyer, but all the data protection stuff says, just in case you didn’t realize what we meant by GDPR, it pretty much means get rid of all the garbage that you don’t need to actually just have someone do regular business on your website. So we all need to start thinking about, boy oh boy, that old school marketing, how does a WooCommerce website reach audience without being a really creepy stalker And bye-Bye retargeting. I mean, yeah, what

Robbie (38:00):
Are we going to do now?

Robert (38:02):
Hey, it’s January. You have plenty of time to reel over your Facebook retargeting budget to something much more meaningful, like actually talking to humans that want to buy your product. So while there was great scale, don’t get me started, Robbie, there was great scale with being able to do that. I think we’re starting to slowly and whether 24 is the year or not, going back to saying, I have a good product. This is why you should buy my product, and I’m not stalking you across multiple social media services, just so I know exactly the things you like and that information data will become less and less available to folks. And if you don’t have a marketing plan to deal with that in 24, definitely 4 25, the folks that have that in place are going to eat your lunch.

Robbie (38:59):
Yep. I’ll give you one of my predictions and that is I think that what we’re going to need to do is have more video on the web. Now that’s not just because I do video, I love video, but what I love about video, and it’s becoming even more important nowadays, is one, your customers do want to know the story. They want to know your story, why you even started your business. They want to know the story behind this product and why it even was invented and what it can do for me. And people want to see video. They have less patience to read that’s gotten worse and worse and worse over the years, but they will consume video as we see, because they’ll consume video on TikTok for hours on end, right? They’d like it short format, but they also like it to tell a story.

(39:40):
People like stories. We always have, we’re storytellers, people are story. We want to tell stories and we want to listen to stories. It’s just built into our DNA from when we were putting it on the sides of cave walls. We like to know the story behind things. And so I think we’re going to see more video being incorporated even into e-com. And if you look at Amazon, they’ve been doing it right? I mean, the last things, you got a succession of photos, and then you probably have a video. It may be a marketing video, but then there’s going to be all these videos of Here’s Bob unboxing. Oh, I used Bob, how funny. Bob unboxing a new microphone and it’s him. It’s just him video and himself cutting it open with a box knife going like, oh, this is some nice packaging. And oh, this feels heavy and sturdy. People love that because they can relate and they learn about that product and it will encourage them to buy your product. So I think we’re going to see more of that.

Robert (40:31):
Victor’s a interesting medium to focus upon because all of the TVs, TVs set top boxes, your Apple TVs, your chrome sticks, yada, yada, yada. I mean, almost all of that is now built into tv. Yeah, it’s easy to just be flicking through some videos on that. No one’s going to be reading off their TV unless they’re very, very strange.

Robbie (40:58):
Exactly. The other thing that did do Robert though for video is like with Hulu opening up their advertising to individuals, I can go and set up an account now, and I can actually purchase my media for my clients if I want to or myself, and I can have advertisements out there, which is why we’re seeing some really bad advertisements on some of the streaming services. But they are out there and you see it. That was the thing, right? They were seen whether it was good content or bad content, they were seen. And so it is opening up a lot of marketing possibilities that were excluded to people who could afford the millions to get on broadcast television. Right now with streaming services, you can actually get in with video content advertising at a lot lower rate. And so it’s opening up a whole new world of advertising, which is good because as you said, privacy is going to, with taking away cookies and actually just having to be more private with people’s information, then it is going to change the way we market. The remarketing, in my opinion, also kind of got crazy. It is still creepy, and I understand the technology behind it. It still creeps me out whenever I open up my phone and go to a social media and they’re giving me ads about what I just discussed with my friends last night over wine, and I am getting ads about it. I mean, this is crazy.

Robert (42:19):
We need to keep our offline discussions much more professional then because that’s just scary.

Robbie (42:25):
Exactly. Exactly.

Robert (42:29):
Let get a little finishing thought on that privacy thing, marketing and stuff. Hey, guess what? Multimedia has been doing this for a hundred years, and only in the last 20 years have we had this specificity where we can really track and stock people. It’s just going to go into the typical media buy world as it did for so much of time on radio and old school tv. And it’s great that, like you mentioned with Hulu, that people can start bidding for TV slots maybe in specific geographies. That’s cool. And yeah, you might not be able to track everyone what they’re doing throughout the day. I think it’s a plus all around.

Robbie (43:18):
Yeah, me too. And I mean, protecting privacy, that just helps all of us. I mean, I want my data protected as well, right? I mean, everybody wants their data protected, so privacy is not a bad thing for web agencies to be thinking about because protecting everyone, it protects their clients and it protects themselves. And so thinking about privacy in the way that you’re setting up a website, especially if it is going to have e-commerce on it, because you’ve actually got some pretty valuable data about people, you’ve got to think about it. And if you don’t know how to do it, there are agencies out there that can help you with that. And so do reach out. And I say that same thing for security, for accessibility. If you can’t do it all in-house as an agency, and I mean we outsource a lot of different things because you can’t be an expert on everything, even if you’re a large agency, if you’re 125 employees, it still doesn’t mean you might have somebody who really should be doing the accessibility and be the end all of your accessibility for clients. So I think that you’ve got to reach out and you’ve got to look at other services out there, make partnerships. If you find a company that you work well with, make a partnership there so that you can offer that service through their partnership. Things like that.

Robert (44:39):
Yeah, a hundred percent of doctors can give me a flu shot 0.01% can perform brain surgery on me.

Robbie (44:47):
Correct? Correct. Awesome. Cool. Well, so on our next agency chat, we will actually have someone from another agency. And we won’t just be giving you our predictions here, but we are actually hoping that this year is going to be very good for all the agencies out there. We’re hoping we see another uptick in our work and for everyone out there, and we’ll try to get some good guests out here that can give you some pointers. And Robert is just bouncing up and down to tell me something.

Robert (46:07):
Anyone who’s going to WordCamp Phoenix, Robbie will be speaking at a session, what’s the title called again?

Robbie (46:14):
Speeding Up Your Web Builds with ai. So I will be talking about AI and how you can use it to speed up your builds and work with clients and speed up that whole process with clients.

Robert (46:28):
And I will not be speaking about ai, but I will be roaming around and giving Robbie grief.

Robbie (46:34):
Oh, exactly. Yes. He’ll just be causing mayhem in trouble. You’re like that little, the guy from the insurance commercials,

Robert (46:43):
Lima imu. limu IMU or the other, oh, no Mayhem.

Robbie (46:47):
No, no one’s always getting beat up or blown up or hit or whatever. He is always got a black eye.

Robert (46:52):
Oh my gosh. And he did a whole bunch of law and order criminal intent. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Not criminal intent. Special Victims unit.

Robbie (47:02):
Yes. Yes. That guy. Don’t forget also the WordCamp. Asia is coming up as well. And do the Woo is going to be there. Bob will be wondering around there as well. And then I think you and Bob will both be at CloudFest. I’m still, I don’t know yet. So there’s lots. And please, as an agency, look at the schedule of events that are out there. Go to some of those events. If you can’t do ’em all, don’t go pick some of them and go to them though. And Network. Network with other agencies. Network with all of these service providers and the SaaS product people and the plugins. Go and network with all of them because it will make your agency better because you have those connections to reach out to.

Robert (47:42):
And@robertjacoby.com will have a list of sort of the WordPress and I’ll call it WordPress ecosystem events that you should be at least looking at, if not going to. So obviously there’ll be multiple CloudFests. There’s the original in Germany, there’ll be one in us, and in May, early June, all the WordCamps.

Robbie (48:06):
I’ll be at that one.

Robert (48:06):
Yes, ma’am.

Robbie (48:09):
All the word camps. Oh, do the Woo is actually a sponsor, by the way. I should have said that. Yep. Do the Woo is a sponsor for WordCamp Asia, a media sponsor. I think also one of the media sponsors at CloudFests, right?

Robert (48:21):
Yeah, so do the Woo is a sponsor at Asia and a media partner for CloudFest, at least the original in Germany. I’m going to assume, because once you’re in the CloudFest universe, you’ll probably be a CloudFest Media sponsor in us, whether you like it or not.

Robbie (48:35):
There you go. There you go. Alright, well we’ll wrap this episode up and don’t forget to catch the next episode of Do the Woo.

Robert (48:44):
Thanks so much, Robbie. Happy New Year.