Marketing Pilgrim

I think the moral of this story will end up being something about stones and glass houses. Apparently, Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently criticized the lack of transparency in the banking industry to the BBC. So what, you ask? Well, he concludes his point by saying “Things that are too big to fail, we want to know everything about them, so we don’t have to deal with this in the future.”

“Things that are too big to fail,” eh? I feel a flashback coming on.

You really want the government and the American public to know everything about businesses that are “too big to fail”? Really?

Thanks to our long-standing partnership with The Customer Collective, we’re able to bring you cool stuff and educational training. The Customer Collective’s upcoming online panel Q&A will help you understand how to use social networking to actually sell stuff–as opposed to just wasting away your day.

Social Selling: Live Q&A on Selling with Web 2.0 takes place 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST March 31, 2009 and registration is FREE!

Want more details? We’ve got you covered!

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How do you take the proven fundamentals of good selling and apply them to social networking? What Web 2.0 tools should you as a sales professional be utilizing to find new prospects and keep the customers you have loyal?

Ever since Facebook rolled out its new design, we’ve heard how millions of users hate the decision, but founder Mark Zuckerberg apparently didn’t care what they thought.

Now Facebook is responding to the vocal minority–yes a few million is a minority among 175 million total users–and will look at making changes to the new layout. I won’t go into all of the changes Facebook has agreed to make because that’s not what I won’t to focus on in this post. Instead, I’d love to hear your thoughts on my theory:

Did Facebook users win the war, or is the social network merely conceding territory it’s apathetic about in order to give the appearance that its users have a say in the company’s future?

Michael Stelzner at the WhitePaperSource has produced a pretty in depth report on the social media marketing industry. The industry now has enough years on it that this research is becoming more valuable to help make sense of this fast growing and often unwieldy area of the marketing mix.

The report is based on interviews of over 900 social media users of varying degrees. The findings are interesting in some areas and not so surprising in others. Some highlights include:

• The Top 10 social media questions that marketers want answered

• Experience levels are low with 72% of the marketers questioned having just started or only being involved in social media for a few months

• As a surprise to me, owners of 2- to 100-employee businesses were the most experienced (29.3% reporting doing social media marketing for years)

by Peter Young

In a move that will surprise few within the industry Google have announced two new features within the Google search results, first an expanded list of related searches and second the rollout of extended snippets—both of which could affect search behaviour quite significantly.

Firstly, Google have announced the deployment of a ‘new technology’ that better understands concepts and relationships associated with a query. This technology will allow Google to offer a greater number of related searches to users via the search results (found at the bottom/top of certain searches).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need. Here’s an example (click on the images in the post to view them larger):

Yahoo has announced the official appointment of Elisa Steele as Chief Marketing Officer, raising the question: Is Yahoo looking to run another company’s playbook?

Yahoo hadn’t seen fit to fill the CMO role since Cammie Dunaway left the company in 2007, and now not only has CEO Carol Bartz appointed one, but she’s appointed someone cut from the same cloth. You see, Steele was poached from NetApp–where Bartz serves on the BoD–and the CMO’s resume includes a stint at Sun Microsystems–where Bartz also previously worked.

What does this all mean for Yahoo? Either it’s coincidental and the company is simply hiring the best people for the job, or Bartz plans on running the same plays called by Sun and/or NetApp. The latter, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes you wonder why Bartz didn’t appoint someone that contrasted her own management experience.