Marketing Pilgrim

Neo@Ogilvy/GSI
Neo@Ogilvy, the digital & direct media arm of Ogilvy, acquired Global Strategies International, “a leading search marketing consultancy,” they announced Friday. GSI specializes in SEO, brand reputation management and training.

In their press release, Neo@Ogilvy said of the merger:

“Search marketing cannot live in a silo anymore,” said Nasreen Madhany, Global CEO of Neo@Ogilvy. “It needs to be part of a 360 strategy for delivering marketing solutions. When managed holistically, search marketing can deliver branding as well as business results. The integration of GSI into Neo@Ogilvy will allow us to deliver end-to-end digital marketing solutions to clients throughout Neo’s global network.”

GSI will keep its founders, including recently elected SEMPO board member Bill Hunt, to “maintain its own identity within Neo@Ogilvy.”

Cisco/Tribe.net
Cisco Systems snaps up another social media website. Last month, it was FiveAcross, which helps companies to put communities, blogs, UGC, video, podcasts etc. on their websites. This month, it’s Tribe.net, a site dedicated to building online communities “for advice and sharing” knowledge based around real cities. Apparently Cisco is hoping to integrate the two to create other established social media sites to help build communities around company websites.

The New York Times reports

They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

Partnering with an unknown social network might work with beer, but we’ll have to see how this goes for Cisco.

Via GigaOM.

Odeo/?
Mashable reports that Odeo has received a $1 million offer. It’s been almost two weeks since the announced Odeo was for sale. They have not yet disclosed who made the offer.

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