Marketing Pilgrim

Econsultancy recently ranted about the one-dimensional marketing world many top brands like Coke operate in. Coke may have the worlds biggest Facebook Fan Page but they’re not on Twitter!! And they aren’t integrating their online and offline ad campaigns either.

“All too often the internet (and mobile) is a last-minute thought, when it should be built into a campaign at the outset. More than that, it should now be hardwired into marketing strategies by default.”

-Why do Top Global Brands Like Coca Cola Ignor Twitter?

Not only has someone else claimed Coke’s brand names on Twitter Coke doesn’t appear to listen. Even though it’s being talked about.  The word ‘Coke’ appears more than 1,000 times on Twitter in just a day (their other brands are mentioned too).

Facebook’s popular “25 Things About Me” meme  has gone viral and has even hit mainstream media (it’s in Time Magazine!). And since you have to have a Facebook account to participate, this simple request has driven a lot of new signups and traffic to the site.

Here’s how it works: you write 25 facts about yourself, post it on Facebook, and tag your Facebook friends so they could fill out 25 random things about themselves. Have you done it yet? If you don’t know how to tag someone, you learn.

It ended up being big – as in about 5 million of these have been written in just one week big. As a result we know far more about the minutia of each other’s lives than we ever did. I’ve known my cousin since we were born and I learned new trivia about her from this meme.

by Regis Hadiaris

Advertising Age is reporting the impact of this recession on marketing, from a survey by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).  The survey shows that 77% of marketers surveyed plan to reduce their advertising campaigns’ media budgets.  The survey participants are comprised of 144 marketers across a variety of industries.

Most interesting were the “next steps” marketers plan to take, specifically:

• 72% of marketers plan to reduce production budgets. If media spend is lower, conventional wisdom says that you would spend less time on ad production.
• 68% plan to “challenge” agencies to reduce internal expenses. Many agencies carry high fixed costs (mostly salaries) and pass those costs on to their clients.

The Gmail Team rolled out a really cool new feature to their Gmail services: you can now have your whereabouts added to your signature at the time your email was sent. I’m sure half of you are thinking “that’s awesome!” while the other half are saying, “who cares?” Google is able to do this through the use of IP detection.

As Gmail Software Engineer, and writer of the script, Marco Bonechi points out, this is the perfect solution for those of us who are frequent travelers. I think this is a great tool for salesman who are frequently returning emails from all over the world. It gives clients and customers an idea of how big your business is. If anything, I would think it is impressive to see a new location from fellow business associates.

This week, there’s been a flurry of news about Twitter’s business plans. Okay, so Twitter’s business plans have been the subject of news for months, but this time it looked like Twitter was about to come out with a revenue model: charging businesses for certain add-on services.

Some people took this to mean that they would charge big brands for using the service in the first place, a claim that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone takes to task on the Twitter Blog. So, just to be clear, even though we reported this correctly earlier this week, I’m going to say it again:

Twitter is not going to charge anyone to tweet

Its basic service has always been and will always be free, as Stone asserts:

by Rene LeMerle

Building on the initial AdSense for Mobile launched back in Sept 2007, Google have just unveiled their new mobile AdSense product.

AdSense for Mobile Search, as it’s been labeled, is aimed squarely at mobile network operators and mobile website owners. The new offering will allow them to embed a Google search box on their mobile sites and cobrand the results pages.

According to the release post:

mobile phone users will get instant access to Google search including comprehensive web search, local, image, and news results — all formatted for their phones. Mobile operators and website owners share in the ad revenue generated by searches originating from their sites.