Marketing Pilgrim

TechCrunch today has no treats—and no joy, no, not even Almond Joy—for Facebook in reporting about its projected financial woes. For a company once valued at $15 billion, things are looking grim as the cash supplies may dwindle long before Facebook is ready or willing to go to IPO.

There’s no denying that Facebook continues to enjoy incredible popularity worldwide—but that could be part of the problem. Facebook’s worldwide growth has been strong over the last year, with 118% growth in monthly unique visitors and 74% growth in page views. But its US growth hasn’t been as impressive, up only 32% from 31 million to 41 million.

After many requests, I’m happy to announce that we’ve launched a new "Agency" service level for Trackur.

The online media monitoring service now offers PR firms and marketing agencies the following valuable options:

• Your logo displayed on the dashboard! Client’s can see your brand, not Trackur’s!
• A custom URL for login. Want Trackur.com/youragency? You’ve got it!
• Unlimited saved searches! Not only can you organize your Trackur account by client campaigns, but now there’s no limit on the number of saved searches–track as many brands, clients, competitors, trends, as you want!
• Annual pricing plan. As well as a monthly plan, you can now pre-pay annually and get a discount and a guaranteed rate for 12 months.

Interested? For more details and pricing of Trackur Agency, drop me an email.

Happy Halloween!

Basically, you have two choices this evening.

1. Turn on all your lights and spend 2 hours praising little kids’ costumes, while they take all the good candy.
2. Turn off all the lights and eat the candy yourself.

I’m not revealing which option I’m taking this year, but don’t be surprised if I have chocolate around my mouth when I wake up on Saturday.

Today’s Picks are especially spooky*

• This could come in handy. Google’s Gmail will soon get text messaging features.
• Worried about the state of the online advertising industry? Don’t worry, the IAB has five measures to save the day.
• If 2009 sees a major recession, you might want to consider these 20 tips to delight your customers you do have.

How much processing power does Google have at its fingertips? It must be a lot because the search engine giant will now include scanned documents in its search results.

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful.

I’ll admit it, I’m not a heavy user of paid search services, but today’s Google AdWords Quality Score changes have me picturing SNL’s Weekend Update team going “Oh really, Google?”

More precise Quality Score calculation
Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most significant component of Quality Score because it directly indicates which ads are most relevant to our searchers. As you probably have observed, ads in high positions typically earn better CTR than those in low positions, because ads in high positions are more visible to searchers. To calculate the most accurate Quality Scores, it’s important that the influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.

I’m going to stick my neck out and say that I do not believe Google had any intention of going through with a partnership deal with Yahoo. Further, I believe that the only reason this deal was done was to prevent Microsoft from getting its grubby little hands on it.

For one thing, since when does Google delay a deal for a significant amount of time, so that regulators can carefully look at the details? That would be akin to a football team taking a time-out so the review booth can have the chance to overturn their OWN touchdown ruling.

Second, the WSJ is reporting that Google may walk away from the deal, rather than comply with the demands of the Justice Department. The same Google that has been criticized for bending over backwards to accommodate the Chinese government!

Wow, is it Thursday? I thought I felt that post-Wednesday, pre-Friday slump.

• It’s been a year since Hulu launched? While I know I joined in the universal berating of the company from its announcement last March, I join TechCrunch in saying, “I’m Glad You Guys Didn’t Suck.“
• SoloSEO has some great ideas for improving stickiness and getting your visitors to come back every day—and yes, the list does go beyond “post every day.”
• Blogs are gaining popularity in the UK, with more than 14 Million U.K. visitors in August, according to comScore. Well, that or more people know what a blog is finally.
• And in the “not necessarily on topic, but pretty cool” category, the Beatles video game has been confirmed, not as a Rock Band expansion, but as its own game. It’s due out next Christmas.