Marketing Pilgrim

I really don’t know what’s worse. A Ryanair employee getting busted for leaving an abusive comment on a blog, or the official–and equally abusive–statement from the airline Ryanair.

I’ll let you read the full details, but long story short, a blogger finds a bug in Ryanair’s booking system and blogs about it. He then receives an anonymous comment–which he later tracks down as a Ryanair employee:

jason!
you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

On the tail of the Oscars this weekend comes a story from the NY Times. I have read it several times because I can’t get over the possibilities. The possibilities of what you ask? There is a new trend apparently starting to surface where celebrities are using Twitter to connect with fans and the mind races with what that could produce. Let’s look at this and then put the collective brilliance of you Pilgrims to work.

According to the article

In addition to being a staple for rapid-fire communication among technophiles and a networking tool for tech-savvy companies, Twitter is swiftly being adopted by celebrities who see it as a way to give the public a controlled peephole into their otherwise highly private lives.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, we might want to start scanning-in images of what we’re trying to find on the search engines. As new data from Hitwise suggests, we’re gradually starting to use more & more keywords when conducting our search engine queries.

Hitwise compared January 2009′s data with last year’s, but I want to take you back farther in time–5 years in fact! Not that my memory goes back that far, but I did remember covering this data for my old blog: Search Engine Lowdown.

Here are the numbers from this year, with Feb 2004′s numbers in parentheses:

1-word searches = 20.29% (19.02%)

2-word searches = 23.65% (32.58%)

3-word searches = 21.92% (25.61%)

4-word searches = 14.89% (12.83%)

E-consultancy reports that a recent study conducted by the UK National Customer Satisfaction Index scored retailers, e-commerce reported a stunning score of 82 points for Q4 2008 (out of 100). Why is this news so interesting? Because the average retailer customer satisfaction score is 74.8.

Amazon and Play.com helped e-commerce separate itself from the rest by posting 85 and 87 satisfaction scores. I had a feeling Amazon would be ranked high on this list, but I’m really surprised to see Play.com achieve such a high customer satisfaction level. I haven’t personally played around with their site too much, but hopefully this will give them some much deserved attention in the conversion-world for their great work.

By David Lindop

Is it time to rethink who we market to on the social networking giants?

What do you think the average age of a MySpace and Facebook user is? Perhaps 16 for MySpace and 22 for Facebook?

According to AdAge, new reports from comScore suggest that over 50% of American Facebook users, and 44% of MySpace users, are actually over 35 years old. It goes further to confirm the largest age demographic on both of these social media platforms is now between 35 and 44.

*pfffoooo!* Pardon the dust, folks. Just have to clean off this old story. . . . There. So, it looks like Steve Ballmer is still—still—interested in buying Yahoo search. Just one short year (plus three weeks) after an initial offer to buy out the company, and all the drama that followed, Ballmer is still pining away—and his desire is apparently completely unrequited.

Last November, Ballmer was saying purchasing the search portion of Yahoo would be “interesting.” This week, he’s “very interested in getting some kind of deal going in search still,” according to CNBC, and without them “Microsoft has no search strategy to speak of” (ouch!). Or, as we put it last month: