Marketing Pilgrim

Facebook has announced some major changes that have been called a response to the Twitter threat and just about everything else. Just like most things in this Web 2.0 social media whirlwind we live in the change is fast and furious and the opinions outpace the change by a considerable margin.

Erick Shonfeld over at TechCrunch does a great job of outlining the changes that Facebook has announced. The changes are for the homepage, profile pages and activity streams. The highlights are as follows:

• No more distinction between private profiles and public pages

• Real time updates of the news feed on everyone’s personal page. In essence, Facebook is looking to be more like Twitter.

• There is also the implementation of a social graph which is a map of social connections between members

By Patricia Skinner

It has been said (too often) that Twitter is for connecting. And with over 6 million users it certainly is. But it’s for so much more than just connecting.

• Can you learn on Twitter? Personally I think it’s one of the best places on the net to get an education on just about any subject you care to name.
• Can you get traffic on Twitter? More than you can cope with if you’re prepared to invest a little time and a little of yourself.
• Can you sell on Twitter? Yes, if you make the right moves.

It’s possible to connect up with your potential target market like no other place on the Web, if you only understand the way Twitter works.

Data portability: it’s one of those buzzwords that everybody just has to be in on these days. From OpenID to Facebook Connect to Google Friend Connect, there are more and more ways to use a single login and take your information anywhere on the web. And today there’s one more: Yahoo Updates through a partnership with JS-Kit.

JS-Kit is described as a “distributed social network connecting more than 600,000 sites.” Sites on that network using the JS-Kit comment widget are already hooked in to Yahoo Updates, enabling users to publish stories and comments from around the web onto their Yahoo Updates feed. Users will also be able to take their Yahoo ID with them around the web. (Starting to sound a bit familiar?) With glittery new APIs, this is all part of Yahoo’s Open Strategy (remember that?).

How would you like to win the brand-spanking-new Amazon Kindle 2 book reader?

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In an attempt to entice more of its users to engage advertisers, Facebook is planning a re-design of its "Pages" which, according to AdAge, will include:

• Pages will soon have tabs, making them resemble Facebook profiles.
• Information shared by pages will show up in Facebook users’ news feeds more often, presenting expanded opportunities to attract new fans.
• Since there will be multiple tabs, Facebook ads can set any tab as a landing page.

However, new research from The Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) suggests that it may not be the ad format that’s the problem, but the platform itself. According to a study of 220 social network users aged between 18-24, they’re just not that interested in ads on social networking sites.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt used Tuesday’s appearance at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco to bluntly describe the economic climate as “pretty dire” and explain how it will affect the world’s largest search engine.

“It obviously will affect the online advertising market because our systems are so tightly tuned. If customers are buying less, it will eventually be reflected in CPCs [cost per click] and CPMs [cost per thousand impressions],” he said. “We are not immune to this.”

Then Google promptly announced 6-figure bonuses for its top executives!

Jonathan Rosenberg, who oversees Google’s products, received the largest bonus at $1.64 million..
Omid Kordestani, Google’s top sales executive, and Alan Eustace, who oversees the company’s engineers, each got bonuses of $1.38 million…
Google gave a $1.24 million to its chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, for his contributions after joining the company in August…
George Reyes, Google’s CFO before Pichette, received a 2008 bonus of $675,000