Marketing Pilgrim

The lack of posts today probably had you guessing that I was either on the road or with clients all day–if only!

At around 7pm last night, my Apple MacBook Pro decided it did not want to boot-up–no matter what troubleshooting I tried. Calls to Apple tech support this morning were equally useless. Fearing the loss of all my data, I headed to my local Apple store and was put on standby to see an Apple “Genius” technician. An hour later, and Scott was able to recover my files and give me a plan for using Time Machine to fill in the blanks.

So, after 24 hours of Apple Hell, I’m back in the loop. So, here’s the news that I would have blogged about today:

• Del.icio.us is hard to type and the site looked dated. Enter Delicious.com and a major overhaul of design and function.

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Just to prove that I read other publications than the Wall Street Journal I turned my eye to a stalwart of the new media age, the New York Times. Ok, so it’s just as “old school” as the WSJ but someone has to read these things, right?

So I ran across a pretty interesting application of MySpace by Cartier of all companies. Now, I can never shop with Cartier and in fact I have a hard enough time pronouncing it but this caught my eye. Most recently, it seems that Facebook has been touted as a good option for business applications while MySpace has been relegated to the teeny-bopper space, spammers and well, let’s face facts here, social misfits. (If Andy said it was OK to write that then direct all hostile comments to him directly, thanks). As far as a networking tool I am a LinkedIn fan but that is just for networking and it isn’t really a place to sell products, especially vanity products like jewelry and accessories (I know a little about this stuff because I am married and I have an 11 year old daughter so stop snickering).

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Google has wasted no time in acquiring Omnisio an online video tools company that only launched publicly in March of this year.

TechCrunch explains what might soon come to YouTube via this acquisition:

The service lets users annotate videos, mash various clips up, and synchronize Slideshare presentations to videos (great for conference presentations). Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web (currently only those on YouTube, Google Video, or Blip.tv). They can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations.

Want to see Ominisio in action? Check out the embeded video below.

Google today announced that it will start providing more “transparency” (its wording, not mine) in its customized search results.

Nothing’s actually changing with the way Google customizes search results, it’s just going to start making it clear what’s at work.

Starting today, you’ll start seeing little messages at the top right corner of your results. They’ll look like this:

When you click on “More Details” you’ll get this message:

Which basically describes the three areas that might receive customization, namely: location, recent searches, and web history. For the full explanation, head to the Official Google Blog.

Now at least, when your SEO clients see their web site listed at #1–when the rest of the world doesn’t–you’ll be able to point them to an official explanation! Or not, depending on your level of evilness.

It’s probably not going to give Microsoft any percentage points in the search engine wars, but the new interactive backgrounds for Live Search sure do look purty.

The new backgrounds feature interactive "hotspots" and are first rolling out to U.S. audiences. More details at the Live Search blog.

Tweens, the age group between 8-12 years old are unique in that they are the first group to have grown up with computer and internet access. They are also getting mobile phones and more grow up using them.

My son who is almost 8 has grown up watching me blog and is now obsessed with Club Penguin. I admit it’s a little disconcerting of thinking to marketing to him or the kids his age. But where there is a market…there are marketers…

My son is a child, but as the article by Marketing Vox suggests, soon he may begin to explore what it means to be a teenager (which I’m far from being ready for). Being a teenager for Tweens means freedom – including freedom to make purchases. And this age group has money to spend (and they can be relentless in their requests to spend it!).

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For Marketing Pilgrim readers who love data – here is a follow-up to Rapleaf’s social media study. The link has a spreadsheet that you can apply formulas to. The study looked at 49.3 million people on social networks and breaks them down by age and gender. This is good to study to look at if you want a general idea where to focus your marketing on a specific social network to a target customer.

The first group post about this talked about how men often have more “friends” on social networks and tend to be on LinkedIn and Flickr. Facebook and MySpace has more women. Men and women on average have 2-25 friends. So if you have more, you’re above average

Other Highlights on the Social Media Network Study:

• Women ages 14-24 dominate activity on social networks and have more friends than men of the same ages.

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Live, from New York Panera Bread in Raleigh, it’s Pilgrim’s Picks!

• Ask.com helps IAC enjoy a good financial quarter.
• Dashboard ad management company Clickable has raised $14.5 million in Series B funding.
• I wonder where MyYearbook got the inspiration for its name? Anyway, the social network for teens just raised $13 million in funding.
• Google Checkout and PayPal have a new competitor: Amazon.com.
• MySpace has named five new executives?

If Google has a legal achilles heel right now, it’s got to be YouTube. The search engine knew it was buying a can of worms, when it set aside $200 million in anticipation of potential lawsuits. Today, Italian broadcaster Mediaset decides that it likes what it sees in the Viacom copyright case, so it too has filed a $780 million lawsuit against YouTube.

According to Reuters:

Mediaset said a sample analysis of YouTube at June 10 found "at least 4,643 videos and clips owned by us, equivalent to more than 325 hours of transmission without having rights".

Mediaset said this was equal to the loss of 315,672 days of broadcasting by its three TV channels.

I think YouTube’s shrug of the shoulders response is hilarious. Reuters says "a YouTube spokeswoman said it did not see the need for the legal case."

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Hey, you know me by now. I read the Wall Street Journal. I do read other things as well. I just figure that my sports addiction may not be of interest to the internet marketing crowd so I talk about that elsewhere (Let’s Go Mets!).

The WSJ had an interesting article on a phenomenon that has become a bit of a pet peeve for me. It’s about the new English that the internet has spawned and its apparent shortcomings for those in the more traditional business world. I know I may come off as sounding “old school” but I don’t mind because I am. This isn’t a new rant for me. When it come to business I firmly believe that “r” is just letter not a verb (are) and “8″ is number and not something you just did at a restaurant. It seems like corporate America agrees.

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A few years back, I partnered up with The Customer Collective (a sales and marketing advice site), giving them permission to syndicate my articles. Listen, when a site built by BusinessWeek, CNET, and Oracle invites you to join, you really don’t need to hesitate.

Now, I’m delighted to pass on a fantastic FREE sponsored offer to Marketing Pilgrim readers.

Join The Customer Collective, it’s simple, free, and just for joining you’ll receive in the mail, a gift box including:

• A free copy of the book Sales Blazers: 8 Goal-Shattering Strategies from the World’s Top Sales Leaders, by Mark Cook.
• A free trial offer for a BusinessWeek subscription.
• Other useful stuff–don’t quote me but it I believe they’ll send you a baseball cap or something.

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I am a FriendFeed fan boy.

That is saying a lot, because I am usually pretty critical of everything.

The platform is easy to use, and makes the first real concentrated effort towards making a single platform for all social media.

One of the main uses I see for FriendFeed is as a reputation monitoring and management tool.

Here are five ways to utilize the service for rep management and monitoring:

1) Establishing a Network – I am a huge proponent of reputation of management through preemptive means. By creating lasting relationships with market publishers and thought leaders you can more easily build your brand, and protect it. FriendFeed gives you a tool to effectively communicate your social media efforts en total with these contacts. It also allows you directly communicate through the feed itself using its “share something” feature, which is a form of micro-blogging.

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