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Your Marketing Job Now Outsourced to India & China

posted on August 6, 2007

There’s a disturbing side-effect that’s coming from the increased use of internet marketing – it can be done cheaper in China and India.

While advertising continues to bring us greater efficiencies and cheaper costs, it’s also driving our need for faster turnaround and rapid deployment. When you can test 100 ads online within a week, you need a solution that can keep up with that pace, without breaking the bank.

I’ve seen two stories recently that suggests that marketing could follow technical support and end-up outsourced to a country with cheaper labor costs.

First, the NYT reports on Publicis’ efforts to build a global digital advertising network that uses offshore labor.

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Are Social Network Users Libertarian Voters?

posted on August 6, 2007

image It seems republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul can’t keep out of the news. Unfortunately, he’s not exactly getting coverage for his dominance in the polls, but for his dominance in social media.

Our own presidential candidates search reputation study shows Paul as having one of the best Google reputations, but CNET’s fascinated by his overall social networking presence.

Paul, 71, enjoys about 160,000 mentions on Digg.com, more than the next four most popular candidates combined. Alexa.com’s statistics show Paul’s Web site with a narrow lead over all the Democratic candidates and a sizable one over his fellow Republicans. Similarly, a report by Hitwise puts Paul’s Web site ahead of other GOP candidates in terms of popularity.

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Plaxo Pulse Aggregating Your Social Networking Profiles

posted on August 6, 2007

It seems that just about every company wants a piece of the social networking industry – and the valuations that go with it – and Plaxo is the latest to join the party.

While Plaxo is already somewhat a social network – after all you can aggregate all of your contacts and share information between them – but with the launch of Pulse, you can now share all of your social profiles.

Plaxo claims Pulse uses “people feeds” to bring together your activities across more than a dozen social networks. Here’s the list of supported sites at launch:

Plaxo says the list of supported sites will continue to grow and you can categorize your contacts so you get to decide who sees those wild photos from that party on Saturday.

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Five Reasons Bloggers Don’t Need a Labor Union

posted on August 6, 2007

It appears some left-wing political bloggers are trying to form a labor union in hopes they’ll receive health insurance and better working standards. Here are five reasons why this is a stupid move.

1. Where do we draw the line?

It seems we can barely agree on how to define a blogger, so how do we decided who gets to join the union?

2. What about other citizen journalists?

Blogging is more of a platform for publishing than the actual profession. Do we include those that publish video online or record audio podcasts?

3. Not all bloggers are created equal.

There are some bloggers that only really put in minimum effort while others are geniuses at the keyboard. Shouldn’t we just let the market decide which bloggers are worthy of better pay and benefits?

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Online Harassment becoming a major concern in Australia

posted on August 6, 2007

Many people are concerned that the Internet and Social Media are difficult to control, and an Australian woman, who was a victim of identity theft and harassment online, has spoken out this week.

When men started calling, emailing, texting, and even turning up at her door, Cathy (not her real name) became aware that a bogus MySpace profile had been set up in her name. The site detailed her personal information, alongside suggestive photographs and explicit text, asking anyone interested to contact her.

It’s not clear how often this kind of thing happens (she thought is was her ex boyfriend), but with 3.8 million profiles in Australia alone, it’s likely that there are many more cases like this, though MySpace insists that it does not tolerate this kind of behaviour.

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Thanks to Our Advertisers

posted on August 4, 2007

Unfortunately we don’t have a rich uncle to support Marketing Pilgrim. Luckily we do have some great advertisers whose support helps us bring you the finest internet marketing coverage.

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SEO Is Dead. Again.

posted on August 3, 2007

Sorry, folks. If you were working in SEO, your career is over. Just ask Tadeusz Szewczyk, who guest posted on Google Blogoscoped earlier this week:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as we know and detest it is obsolete in this day and age. When some while ago Philipp asked me to write an article “How do I optimize websites” I couldn’t do it: The way SEO works in Germany on Google.de can not really work for international websites in English. Moreover nowadays you do not need conventional SEO tactics to have success on the Net or in Google. In order to make a site succeed in these times you have to forget everything you know about on page optimization and link building first.