Marketing Pilgrim

Honestly, I am not sure what to make of this. Bloomberg has reported that Morgan Stanley, at least its European arm, has produced a report with insights into the mind of one Matthew Robson. He is a 15 year old intern at the securities firm (doing what I might ask?). Apparently this young man has the pulse of every teenager regardless of economic background etc when it comes to how they consume media.

The schoolboy was asked by the bank’s European media analysts to report on what he and his peers look for in the information-entertainment industries. What they got was one of the “clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen,” the analysts said.

“Teenagers are consuming more media, but in entirely different ways and are almost certainly not prepared to pay for it,” Morgan Stanley analysts Edward Hill-Wood, Patrick Wellington and Julien Rossi said in a note, citing Robson.

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Just within the last month there have been reports of the number of defections from Google and the steps that Google has been taking to stop the activity. They may need to ratchet up their efforts however. Hot on the heels of the news that one of their biggest legal eagles has nested elsewhere we learn that there is another mutiny on the good ship Google-pop. TechCrunch reports that

After nearly 5 years with the company, Engineering Director Mark Lucovsky is leaving Google for a role with VMware we’ve learned.
Lucovsky has been an integral part of Google’s APIs, including the all-important Search APIs.

Mr. Lucovsky’s pedigree is quite significant. He spent 16 years with Microsoft and was given the title of Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. His accomplishments at Microsoft were so significant that when he went to tell Steve Ballmer that he was leaving Microsoft for Google ….. well, let’s just say Mr.Ballmer didn’t react well. I have altered the quote for a PG-13 rating but if you want the real deal go to TechCrunch. I suspect you will get the gist here.

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It wouldn’t be the Internet if there wasn’t just as much talk of legal action as there is of innovation. Google knows this better than anyone as they fend off lawsuits on a regular basis that are related (at least loosely in some cases) to their offerings and the apparent lines that are crossed by the search giant. Twitter has gotten a taste of that with the Tony LaRussa impersonation account issue. As a result, Twitter has just landed a bit of a catch by nabbing one of Google’s top lawyers.

According to the NY Times

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, has stolen a prominent Google lawyer.

The start-up has hired Alexander Macgillivray, deputy general counsel for products and intellectual property at Google, to be its general counsel, according to a person with knowledge of the hiring.

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Thanks to a long-running business partnership with Social Media Today, we’re able to offer Marketing Pilgrim readers yet another FREE webinar!

The free webinar is hosted by SAP and will take place at 1:00pm ET/ 10:00am PT on the topic of "The Stimulus Package: What Does it Mean for Your Business?"

Before you dismiss the webinar, thinking "stimulus package, how does that help me?" You might want to reconsider. The panel of experts promise to help you learn:

• How to leverage the $787 billion federal stimulus package: Find out exactly where the federal stimulus package will help your everyday business – and where it won’t. Also discover what you can do to best leverage the funding and tax breaks that are available.
• How to uncover the "hidden" stimulus in your business: Our experts will share strategies, tools, and real-life examples of changes you can make internally to find new savings and spur business growth.

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It seems like a new report on social media marketing is released weekly. Today, we see a new report from Razorfish–which surely must help with its attempts to find a knight in shining armor.

Aside from Razorfish’s creation of a new Social Influence Marketing (SIM) Score–which measures the reach and sentiment of your brand in social media–there’s nothing earth-shattering contained in the Fluent report.

Except, perhaps, this:

76% of the 1,000 consumers polled, said they trust their offline friends when making a product purchase decision. Compare that to just 33% who say they trust their online friends!

Clearly, this demonstrates that while social networks might encourage us all to be one big friendly social network, we’re clinging to our old-school definition of friend. It’s somewhat encouraging to see that we’re not collectively being duped into believing that when we add someone as a "friend" we’re instantly BFFs.

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In all honesty, there is not much to talk about at the start of a week that truly moving toward the dog days of summer. Let’s take one more look at the Sun Valley meeting of last week to see if a gathering of the most influential media executives can garner something of interest. Errr…..not really. Best we can come up with is the Wall Street Journal report that MySpace is looking to focus on the entertainment space. Shocking! I feel like such a slacker when I get blindsided by this kind of breaking news. It’s now very apparent that if we didn’t have these kinds of meetings of these great minds we wouldn’t have the kind of insight and wisdom unavailable to us commoners like the following

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Rosetta Stone, the company that makes the software that can help you learn any language (according to their advertising that is) is joining the line of companies who are suing Google over trademark infringement in AdWords campaigns. The Washington Post reports says that the company has filed their suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia

Rosetta Stone asked the court to stop Google from allowing other firms — including competitors — to use its trademarks to sell ads associated with online searches.

“Google and its advertisers benefit financially from and trade off the goodwill and reputation of Rosetta Stone without incurring the substantial expense that Rosetta Stone has incurred in building up its popularity, name recognition and brand loyalty,” Michael Wu, general counsel of Rosetta Stone, said in a statement.

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The Sun Valley media and technology conference opened Wednesday. We like to make fun of the confab of media moguls and owners as “navel gazing” (hence the pun in the post title!)—I mean, a media conference that’s closed to the press?—but since the press seems to be swarming around outside the conference and lots of people seem willing to talk, I guess it’s time to fire up the ol’ rumor mill.

First up, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. In a press conference last night, Schmidt said he tried for six years to save us from Chrome and the pending Google OS, but eventually the wave of enthusiasm that is Larry Page and Sergey Brin overpowered his objections:

“I just gave up,” Mr. Schmidt said. “But there is no question I am hugely supportive of Chrome and Chrome OS. They are game-changers. They change the way you think about your computer.”

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Google is still going about its search business despite the flurry of activity around its Chrome OS and all other things Google. Today, on the Official Google Blog, they announced the introduction of better, more comprehensive search results for places.

Using our Universal Search technology, we have provided maps in our search results for more than two years. However, as any traveler could tell you, knowing the geographical location of a place is only part of the story. It’s often just as valuable to get a sense of what the place is like, and there’s no better way to do that than by looking at images of some of its most important sights.

Rather than just heist the images they used I did some exploring myself. Raleigh, NC and Cary, NC (neighboring ‘cities’) each had their own map and pictures.

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It’s a saga we’re all familiar with by now: create a pretty awesome web service, start a trend, become a media sweetheart, make lots of money (VC or acquisition), get slapped with a lawsuit. Or two. Or fifty billion. Facebook added two more lawsuits to its heap recently: a countersuit from Power.com and a click fraud proceeding.

Facebook filed suit against Power.com in December. Facebook claimed the one-stop social-media aggregator was infringing upon their copyright, violating their TOS and scraping proprietary data. At the time, we weren’t sure whether “proprietary data” included user information.

Power.com finally decided not to take this sitting down. TechCrunch reports that Power.com has now filed a countersuit, claiming Facebook is “unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS), and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services like Power.com to access the data, among other things.”

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I’d imagine a lot of us can relate to the nightmare that surrounds having to complain to any airline–especially when it comes to lost or damaged luggage.

So, you can imagine the frustration endured by singer/songwriter Dave Carroll as he tried to get United Airlines to pay for $1200 of damages to his guitar. After eight months of back and forth with United, Carroll decided to write the whimsical "United Breaks Guitars," record a video, and post it to YouTube.

1,351,943 views later, United is finally paying attention to Carroll.

…spokeswoman Robin Urbanski declared Tuesday that “this has struck a chord with us.” On Wednesday, she added that “his video is excellent, and we plan to use it internally as a unique learning and training opportunity to ensure that all our customers receive better service…. This should have been fixed much sooner.”

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Despite the millions of dollars Microsoft is spending in an attempt to get us to use Bing, it’s apparently still well aware of the hand that feeds it.

A lot of searchers are still conditioned to begin all web browsing at Google, and Microsoft knows that it’s crucial that Bing is easily found. So, you can imagine their angst at seeing the following in a search for Bing:

Yep, the second result for Bing suggests searchers might wan to stick with Google for a while. Now, if you read the snippet, you’ll see why we even got to this situation–a power outage last Friday temporarily took out Bing’s Travel site.

Apparently, Google’s spider has been on vacation since then:

Notice, Google hasn’t re-indexed the page since July 4th! Do you smell a conspiracy theory? Since when does it take Google that long to revisit a site as popular as Bing?

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