Welcome to our social-media-free-online-biz-and-marketing links digest AKA the CLICK THRU!

This month’s round-up includes a podcast episode on 2025 marketing trends, investigative reporting on AI data centers, the Hawk Tuah dating app, and more!

As always, this is a choose-your-own-adventure sort of endeavor, so you’re invited to dip your toe in one link at a time, dive into the deep end and open them all at once, or just hang out in the splash zone of the comments and see what surfaces there.

Please remember that I don’t necessarily know the folks who create the things I link to, and I definitely don’t endorse every single thing that every single person I mention writes, says, or shares. Also, if I link to anything sponsored or an affiliate-ed, that will be clearly marked with the words “sponsored” or “affiliate link.”

OK that feels like enough disclaimers, so onward to our sixth CLICK THRU + I’ll see you in the comments!

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2025 MARKETING TRENDS

If you want to go deeper with any of these links, a lot of them came up in my conversation about 2025 Marketing Trends with Amanda Laird!

It’s perfect listening while you peruse the CLICKTHRU. Click here or the players below to enjoy 80 minutes of us chatting about what we see happening for social media & small business marketing in 2025.

WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

💀 Meta is going the way of X and getting rid of fact-checking in favor of a community notes system. If you want an (admittedly opinionated) overview, Taylor Lorenz wrote a great piece pulling together different sources on the status of “free speech” on Meta platforms.

🚫 Speaking of X, according to Mashable, it declined in basically every way last year (with lower users, revenue & overall value). But they’re launching X Money in 2025 anyway?! Right as their competitor Bluesky is raising another round of funding.

🤥 Did anybody else know that Whatsapp has a comprehensive suite of business messaging services that brought in almost $1billion last year? I can’t imagine ever messaging a company on Whatsapp, but I know my friends in other countries do it regularly.

📲 The first paragraph of this article on how AI data centers are impacting our power sources really got my attention. So let me share it with you here:

“AI data centers are multiplying across the US and sucking up huge amounts of power. New evidence shows they may also be distorting the normal flow of electricity for millions of Americans … An exclusive Bloomberg analysis shows that more than three-quarters of highly-distorted power readings across the country are within 50 miles of significant data center activity.”

🔥 And important follow-up read that puts AI water use in the context of the LA fires.

⏰ I haven’t been on TikTok in years, but I’m still following this timeline of the latest TikTok ban updates.

👎 After some WILD (& racist) things happened, Meta is “killing off” their AI profiles.

😤 Another day, another study that says social media might put you in a bad mood.

ONLINE BIZ (MONEY) MAGIC

💸 I’ve been reading Dana Miranda’s new book You Don’t Need a Budget and it's got me thinking about money A LOT. I also really appreciate this piece she wrote for her newsletter on how to prepare our finances for a fascist regime.