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.

As most of Facebook’s growth is outside the US, you’d expect that most of their revenue comes from advertisers targeting international audiences, as well. But that’s not the case. As TechCrunch pointed out months ago, many, many countries generate little to no advertising revenue per user. And that’s just the beginning of growth woes:

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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.
• Despite its success, Facebook may soon need to raise additional funding.

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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.

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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.

In the coming days, we’ll update the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounts for ad position. This will result in more accurate Quality Scores, ensure that ads compete fairly for position based on their quality and bid, and enable Google to show the most relevant ads to searchers by rewarding high-quality advertisers with better ad positions.

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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!

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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.

Today the WSJ profiles a number of video search engines that actually seem to be getting smarter. Instead of relying on external meta data to determine the content of a clip, these engines are looking to data internal to the clip itself—including dialogue and people (or characters) appearing in the clip. And yep, one day YouTube might not be the #1 video search engine (although they may still be the #1 video hosting site).

Some of the more advanced video indexing technology is capable of indexing by images in the video, including characters and actors, using a form of facial recognition software:

Elsewhere, VideoSurf Inc. is analyzing the actual visual content of videos using technology known as “computer vision algorithms,” which produces more relevant search results, says Lior Delgo, the company’s chief executive. Computer vision is the science of programming computers to process and analyze images and video.

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If you’ve ever read one of my posts and thought to yourself, "Pfff, I could do so much better than that!" Now’s your chance.

For the next week, we will accept applications to become a guest writer at Marketing Pilgrim. We’re looking for writers who can write informative posts, are passionate about an area of online marketing, and can share their opinion without being offensive (believe it or not, that is hard for some folks).

You’ll be writing for the fame and glory, rather than the paycheck. Those of you still reading; you’re the ones I want to hear from.

Drop an email to editor AT marketingpilgrim.com with the following:

• Your name (duh!)
• The niche you’d enjoy writing about (see the category list to the right)
• A sample of your previous work (either as an attachment or a link)

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How much of a shock is it to return from Hawaii to North Carolina and face 50F days? Let me show you what I just left:

**sigh**

Oh well, on to today’s Picks:

• Thanks to Inc. magazine for inviting me to share my thoughts for this excellent article on analyzing web analytics to discover marketing ideas.
• I love the case study Diane Aull uses in her article on pricing your products/services.
• You only have until November 5th to enter the 2009 Effie Awards Competition.
• Bryan Eisenberg wants you to join him in some Halloween "Trick or Tweet" fun tomorrow.

I think the next GEICO "celebrity" TV ad should feature AOL. You know the ads I’m talking about. GEICO brings in a celebrity that once lived in the limelight but now, sadly, can’t get any better work other than co-starring with an animated gecko.

I say this because AOL has seen better days. Once the 800 gorilla of the internet, AOL has spent the last few years trying to find that one big comeback role that will revive its career.

Its latest comeback attempt is to bring social networking widgets to the AOL homepage. Over the coming weeks, AOL users (you know who you are) will soon have access to the following:

AOL’s own AIM and Bebo, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook. Called "My Networks," the tabs invite members to log into their social profiles and see a limited amount of information–feed and in-box updates from Facebook and MySpace, new Twitter messages, AIM status messages, etc.–as well as links to access the full versions of the apps.

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Unless you have a lot of friends on Facebook that are illiterate, I’m betting you won’t have too much trouble identifying the latest attempt to infect your computer with the Koobface trojan. Here’s the type of message that typically accompanies the attempt to infect you:

"Sommebody uupload a viideo witth you on utubee. you shuold ese"

Even my dog can spell better than that.

OK, so the hackers are likely deliberately misspelling words so as to avoid spam filters, but still, would you click on the above?

You might, if you saw that the link went to a legitimate site such as Google. But, don’t be fooled.

On Tuesday, researchers at unified threat management vendor Fortinet noticed that a program similar to the Koobface worm had started using the Google Reader and Picasa Web sites to spread. In the attack, criminals host images that look like YouTube videos on the Google sites in hopes of tricking victims into downloading malicious Trojan software.

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