Marketing Pilgrim

Local search is an interesting animal to say the least. There are seemingly a million different directories and resources to help bring search to the street level but it is so scattered that it frustrates more often than is helps. Citysearch has been around the scene virtually since the beginning of the commercial Internet. In fact, it’s hard to do a local search without seeing a Citysearch result come up.

In an article from Internet News the discussion is about some changes to Citysearch that have been asked for by its users for quite some time. These changes now incorporate social media and mobile opportunities to bring this Internet standard up to speed. CEO Jay Herrati says that these changes have been a long time coming.

Just a quick reminder that we’re giving away an Amazon Kindle 2 to one lucky Marketing Pilgrim reader.

It’s dead easy to enter and you can find all of the details right here.

Over at Gawker.com there is some insider dirt being dished regarding internal correspondence from Facebook that shows its founder Mark Zuckerberg in a pretty unflattering light. In between appearances on Oprah and redesigning Facebook he has been letting the employees know how he really feels about customers.

Apparently he didn’t stick around Harvard long enough to learn that you use the term customers when someone pays for a service. Since accounts receivable is the smallest department at Facebook with little work to do, he may want to be a little more endearing to his users.

Paul Bennett is an honorary Pilgrim and his company is currently conducting a survey to learn more about how companies are using Twitter.

His hope is to collect enough data to put together a report on how brands can leverage Twitter, and share it with Marketing Pilgrim readers.

This is one of those deals where the more people that take the survey, the more value we’ll all get out of the results.

It’s Friday, so while you’re goofing off this afternoon, take 2 minutes to complete this quick survey. The deadline is March 31st, in case you don’t have time today.

Cheers!

SpiralFrog, the music download service supported by ads, has finally croaked. The service publicly launched with a bang back in 2007 but needed $9 million in funding just to keep the lights on in 2008, and now CNET is reporting the web site is no more.

In SpiralFrog’s situation, the company couldn’t overcome “a macro-economic perfect storm” says a source close to the company. The sagging global economy, combined with “the collapse of the capital markets” and rapid compression of the ad markets,” led to the company’s demise, said the source.

Part of me feels vindicated that the freemium model isn’t the holy grail that everyone predicted. After all, if a service offers free music downloads–with the user only having to endure a few ads–and still can’t survive, what comfort does that give to other ad-supported consumer sites?

By Nick Stamoulis

Lately it seems like the social communication behavior and methods people use to interact are more like tangled-up power lines. Years ago there were traditionally only a small handful of ways to communicate; at work, phone, fax and face-to-face. For the last ten years or so many generations have been able to adopt email as a crucial form of communication, but now there are many newer social networking methods of communication between consumers, businesses, friends and families.

How many people do you know across different generations that actually have Facebook accounts? The numbers are staggering, but to a marketer and business owner it is crucial to understand that one size does not fit all. Even though these generations tend to actively use social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn they are still VERY different overall in the way they communicate.