Marketing Pilgrim

By Danny Brown

In a move that won’t surprise as many people as it would have this time last year, Fox Interactive Media has announced it will be cutting its workforce by as many as 100 jobs. Fox is the parent company of social network site MySpace as well as Photobucket and various mobile sites.

The move, which accounts for 5% of employees across the board, is another sign that MySpace and Photobucket are falling increasingly behind in the social networking battle. With Facebook and Flickr taking away much of the core audience of Fox Interactive’s babies, the signs aren’t good for Tom Anderson and his friends.

But is it such a surprise?

CNET reports that there is a Chrome sighting over on YouTube. Google recently began showing display and overlay ads on YouTube, and now seems to be pushing their own product line. 

I think this raises a few questions as to Google’s 2009 objectives:

1. Is Google going to put a greater focus on promoting their own products like Chrome? 
2. At what cost is Google willing to promote their products? Technically it is “free” for them to promote on YouTube, but with every Google ad they show they miss the opportunity to make money off of someone’s ad.

CNET also reports that Chrome is being advertised on the Facebook Scramble Game.

So what’s Google saying about all this?

Over at RWW, Marshall Kirkpatrick takes a look at whether RSS service PostRank has what it takes to mount a challenge to our dependency on oil Feedburner.

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It’s really handy, so we’re excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off?

Can PostRank pull it off? I’ll let you read Kirkpatrick’s analysis but I’m not putting my money on PostRank.

An independent study, of how the firm ETS managed to make a major mess of the UK’s Sats student exams, includes a conclusion that warms my Radically Transparent heart.

Giving evidence yesterday, [Lord] Sutherland said: "I don’t know companies that don’t do that kind of probing, whether it’s by telephone or Googling.

"If you Google, first you get the press cuttings and then you say, ah no, that’s so and so but here’s a serious report that maybe we need to inquire into further – and that’s what wasn’t done."

After awarding ETS a contract worth around $215M, the government failed to take a look at a Google search fingerprint that revealed the company had a track record of failures.

Six short months ago, I was sitting in a hospital bed. Glad not to be there now!

• Time for the periodic rumor about eBay selling Skype!
• Great, now that we’ve got that out of the way, on to the Google news! Yes, the war against spam is a serious affair. Google chronicles the year in spam.
• Google’s been closing projects left and right. Yet Knol has survived Google’s orphan-project killing spree so far.
• Those copyrighted works in Google Book Search? Turns out there are few free books in the Google Library. Surprise, surprise.
• Google print ads were another recent casualty, but it’s still hard at work with radio ads.

By Danny Brown

Despite the doom and gloom of the last quarter in 2008, online sales still totaled over $25 billion last year. Leading online analysts comScore noted that while these figures represented a drop from 2007, unique visitors to retailer websites actually increased by 5%. So, less spending but more visits—which means you need to be ready for these visitors.

What Do You See?

Visual attraction is still one of the best marketing and advertising tools available, and what could be better than video advertising? It’s instant, it’s attention-grabbing and it shows your product better than any still image ever could. So why are so few retailers using video advertising?