Marketing Pilgrim

How would you like to launch a social network and instantly amass more than 150 million monthly users?

Well, Google just launched Google Buzz and it’s going to be tied into its existing Gmail user base–all 150+ million of them!

How smart is that?

Google has failed to gain traction with any of its previous social networking efforts. How many of you are active Orkut or Google Wave users? So, instead of trying to build a new social network from scratch–and likely failing–it’s tying Google Buzz directly into its email offering.

Genius!

Generating buzz—getting people talking about our products or even advertising on their own—is the goal of many ad campaigns today, even television commercials. (Case in point: the Super Bowl.) Online, buzz seems to be the Holy Grail: going viral, getting evangelists, having people talking/Tweeting/friending/following you. But assigning a value to that can be hard. We’re driven to assign an ROI to social media, but we’re having a hard enough time even monitoring success.

General Sentiment, a sentiment analysis company, has come to the rescue. Using media prices, they’re looking to answer the question “How much would it have cost to attract the same media exposure through traditional advertising?” And they’re putting a $ sign in front of it.

Ask’s parent company IAC posted $1B in losses largely because it wrote down the value of its search business. But, says the AP, this is actually good news for the online ad market (and not because a competitor is about to get out of the market)—because IAC didn’t do as badly as expected.

No, because it beat estimates by 2¢ per share, a nine-figure loss “offered the latest indication that the online advertising market is improving,” as the AP says. IAC investors seemed to agree, since it the stock jumped four percent after the results were posted.

If fear, scandal, sex, and humor sell newspapers, it stands to reason that those topics would make for the most popular articles on news sites and blogs. Right?

Wrong!

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles and discovered that it was an entirely unexpected emotion that caused the average reader to share an article.

UPDATE: Google Buzz is now live!

The buzz around the Internet marketing and social media circles is humming with the news (or the rumor, call it what you want) that Google is getting set to introduce a new feature to Gmail. No, it has nothing to do with your e-mail but rather your ‘experience’ with Gmail and in particular your social experience. Looks like Google is getting into the social game.  This comes on the heels of the talk of Facebook getting into the e-mail game as well. What’s going on? It’s like opposite day with Google going social and Facebook getting all e-mail on us.

Everyone in the world of marketing whether you are online or offline (or hopefully the right combination of the two) wants to better define social media and its uses. Different sectors or verticals see how the various social media tools impact their particular type of business and no two seem to act alike. Much of that has to do with having too little real data to draw firm conclusions from and the learning curve that is occurring on the customer side of this equation.

Since its unveiling last month, the iPad has been labeled a Kindle killer. The parallels are obvious—the largest (and newest) Kindle has the same size screen, both have Internet connectivity, and both can be used to read books. But that just about sums up the Kindle’s selling points, and the iPad’s features list continues on out the door. So could a full-color touchscreen tablet computer and a B&W eReader really be considered the competitors the media continue to make them out to be?

Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey shows that traditional media is trending downward among “informed publics aged 25-64 in 20 countries”—and so is their trust in “a person like yourself” (although much less dramatically).

The executive summary shows traditional media trust is diving, with TV news down 20%, radio news down 17% and print news down 12%. However, digital media isn’t exactly making up the gap—radio and TV news coverage still slightly beat out online search engines (38%, 36% and 35%, respectively), and newspaper articles close behind (34%). Corporate communications (press releases, I guess) were also in the same tier—significantly ahead of social networking sites (19%), which only barely edged out product advertising (17%).