Marketing Pilgrim

T-Mobile UK shared advice and experience on search marketing with WebTrends Engage attendees.

Check out how much the company spends on paid search!

Wouldn’t you love to earn the 10% management fee on that budget!

At the WebTrends Engage conference Eepybird–the wacky guys behind the Diet Coke/Mentos experiments–provided a sneak-peak at their next experiment.

Watch what the guys can do with a few thousand Post-It notes.

They plan to put together experiments with hundreds of thousands of the sticky colored notes.

You saw it here first!

Subscribe to Marketing Pilgrim and never miss another exclusive video!

Facebook is working on a platform for bands that will be launched later this year. This was reported on paidContent.org. They said that the rumor was started yesterday morning.

According to the rumors, Facebook will offer more to bands than MySpace does. They will let bands and labels to create pages, and let them embed custom widgets to market their events and music.

Click here to continue reading...

IBM and Google announced a new initiative to offer free education and facilitate collaboration on software programming at universities. They plan to open data centers for students to program in what is called “cloud computing.” They call it the “academic cluster computing initiative” and gets large groups of students together to collaborate and write code online.

The two companies have donated the hardware, software, and services. The initiative is already working at the University of Washington. Next, on to Carnegie-Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. They are also offering services to the public and want to make complex processes more efficient.

Click here to continue reading...

Google Maps continues to expand its Street View to include six new cities:

• Chicago (some high res)
• Pittsburgh
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix (high res)
• Portland
• Tucson (high res)

Notice a ‘P’ theme?

In addition to some high resolution photos, Google added the ability to pan up now. They give the example of the Sears Tower (in Chicago). You can actually continue to pan up past the buildings and see what it would be like to lay on your back in the middle of S Upper Wacker Dr.

Click here to continue reading...

Less than two weeks after Google acquired Zingku, a mobile social network, they announce that Google has acquired Jaiku.

The name isn’t the only similarity between the two recent purchases. Like Zingku, Jaiku is designed to appeal to mobile users. As Jaiku states in the acquisition FAQ:

Jaiku is an activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones. Jaiku, Ltd. was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland. The service was released on the Web in July 2006. Jaiku is based in Helsinki.

Click here to continue reading...

A former manager who sued Google for age discrimination will get another day in court. Brian Reid is 54 and claims a supervisor told him his opinions were “too old to matter,” and that he was forced out of his job.

Brian Reid says Google discriminates against older employees. He cites examples that younger managers got better reviews and pay compared to older managers. Now he has another chance to prove his case in court. This isn’t a new case – Reid sued Google in July of 2004 but it never went to trial. California’s Sixth District Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday that the case be re-opened. They believe there is enough evidence to move forward with a jury trial.

Click here to continue reading...

The New York Times ran a piece on the social networking site StumbleUpon yesterday. StumbleUpon has 3.5 million registered users. They start with the idea that StumbleUpon gives people recommended web sites based on their interests (sites they give a “thumbs up” to) and history of previously stumbled sites. They want to help you discover new sites that you will probably like.

According to Quantcast and the data I ran Alexa, traffic from StumbleUpon still lags behind Digg. However, in my experience it’s easier and quicker unless you get promoted to the home page or rank highly on the site. I wonder how the model skews these results.

Click here to continue reading...

By Vinny Lingham

ReachLocal announced today that they have received a further round of  funding by Rho Ventures, in conjunction with their original investors. The latest round of funding is $55.2m–which values the company at $305m.

ReachLocal’s target market are Small & Medium enterprises, and they have built a platform that allows smaller companies to easily market themselves.

Click here to continue reading...

By Roderick Ioerger

The newspaper industry has been feeling a lot of pressure for some time now to reverse the industry trend and restore revenue growth. In November of 2006 Yahoo and a consortium of seven newspaper companies came to an agreement opening up 176 different newspapers to one of the world largest online communities.

Yahoo’s HotJobs service was the key piece of the revenue puzzle, allowing the newspapers to take advantage of the technology platform that Yahoo had already created by driving sales of the HotJobs service for hundreds if not thousands of local businesses in each market. The other element and maybe the more important one long term for the newspapers is the use of Yahoo’s technology to be able to sell advertising across the newspapers entire web site.

Click here to continue reading...

After a much delayed flight, I finally made it to Las Vegas last night. After a restful night’s sleep at the Rio, I’m ready for the WebTrends Engage conference.

Still, even a comfortable bed couldn’t stop me from rising at 6am to bring you the latest marketing buzz.

• PayPerPost launches URLBrief. It works like TinyURL, but includes tracking and the option to send a user to one of many destinations. I’m think of using this to promote our advertisers–a single link, that randomly displays an advertiser. Look for it soon.

Click here to continue reading...

Lots of buzz this morning surrounding a curious message that appeared at the bottom of Charlie O’Donnell’s Twitter conversation.

Could it be that Twitter is testing users’ reactions to adding small text messages to their Twitter conversations? It certainly looks that way.

Interestingly, the message didn’t appear on the web version of the conversation, only the mobile version. That might suggest the ads could at some point rely on your location to send you geo-targeted, relevant ads. Tell your Twitter followers that you’re heading out to lunch in Raleigh, and the Twitter tip might suggest a restaurant.