Marketing Pilgrim

Just a quick note to let you know about 3 new updates to Trackur. There’s something for everyone!

1. Trackur Enterprise and Agency now both come with updates every 30 minutes! Now you can keep an eye on your brand–or your clients’–in almost real-time.
2. Re-order your saved searches. Such a simple change, but you can now drag and order your saved searches. Handy for keeping your most important monitored keywords at the top of your list!
3. A new 2nd tier added to the Trackur Affiliate program. Not only do you earn 35% on all recurring monthly payments, but now, when someone signs up for the affiliate program–via your affiliate link–you’ll earn 20% commission on their commission! That’s money for doing nothing!

Google’s Friend Connect got a new gizmo, or should I say gadget? Technically it isn’t a gadget because its main purpose is to organize the Friend Connect gadgets that a site uses. The Friend Connect social bar is designed to simplify the process of using multiple Google Friend Connect gadgets on your site.

The 36 pixel high bar runs across the top of a site and contains a site wide activity feed, a comments section, and a list of site members. Installation for the social bar is relatively easy with Google providing a video demonstration. Google also provides an example site that showcases the social bar in action.

The social bar was announced on Google’s new Social Web Blog, which has the motto, “News and updates about Google products that are helping to make the web more social”

New research from Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross and the Weber Shandwick team suggests company executives are well aware of the importance of a spotless reputation–and just how easily they can personally screw it up!

Of the 703 senior executives polled a whopping 100% of CEOs admit to frequently thinking about their company’s reputation–although only 38% of executives seem to care about their personal reputation. Clearly they’ve not heard that 87% of us tie a CEO’s reputation to that of the company (source: Hill & Knowlton).

It also appears that the higher-up the totem pole an executive is, the less threats he or she sees against their company’s reputation. At the CEO level only 56% see a "High/Moderate" threat to the company reputation, while those below the chief executive see a 67% threat. Of course, both camps are being a little too hopeful, what with previous studies showing 83% of companies will face a reputation crisis in the next five years that devalues them by 20-30% (source: Oxford-Metrica).

It appears that even the co-founder of MySpace is placing his money on Facebook to win the social networking wars–if only for the next couple of years.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Brett Brewer co-founder of MySpace who sold the social site to News Corp, said:

“There’s a fundamental shift going on,” Mr Brewer said. “Both sites are … different. We built MySpace for people to find and connect with people they don’t know. Facebook is … built around connecting with people you already know.

“Clearly, the world eagerly embraced MySpace, but as the average person has adopted social networks, where they come to first is making connections with the people they already know. Facebook has done an excellent job of capitalising on that.”

The trend continues as social media companies, in this case Facebook, seek to go beyond marketing deals and look to establish partnerships / alliances with makers of cell phones and other mobile technology. As per usual all of this activity centers on Facebook’s quest to, as the WSJ put it, ‘generate meaningful revenue from its mobile services’. Let’s be realistic, that quest for meaningful revenue regarding anything that Facebook has done is now the equivalent of a business spectator sport. We all watch looking for the home run or touchdown and we wonder if the team has what it takes to make that happen. Despite that, we still show up and hold out hope.

It’s been a year since Southwest Airlines announced they were going to test in air Internet service. Now it’s really happening. The satellite broadband will be tested on one plane first. Then they plan to expand to at least three more planes by March.

The test will run for 60 days. They will gauge demand and see how the service works before determining if and how much they’ll charge.

Southwest has already contracted with Yahoo as a partner. Yahoo will provide a home page for the airline that will include information about the flight and destination.

For long flights this will practically guarantee that I fly Southwest. My only question is, what about plugs or battery supply? As far as I know there’s no place to recharge.