Marketing Pilgrim

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to chat with Andrew Warner about the topic of reputation management. We spent about an hour discussing the ins and outs of reputation management, including the difficulty of monitoring conversations that take place deep within a web forum thread.

Here’s how I explained my strategy for managing negativity in closed forums or message boards:

You need to focus in on monitoring just the ones that are influential. Because message boards are complex and deep in the web, chances are the others aren’t not going to bubble up outside of that web community.

The moment something does, it’s almost like when a virus jumps from an animal to a human. We don’t care as much all the while it’s confined to a bird or pig. It’s when it first occurs in a human that we act.

While Twitter continues to tease us with its advertising plans, third-party providers continue to get creative with their efforts to make money from the micro-blogging service. Next in line to give it a shot is TwitPub, which lets you charge users to access your protected Twitter stream.

Here’s how TwitPub explains its "get rich quick" service:

TwitPub is just another fantastic way to monetize Twitter. The best way to be rewarded for generating quality content (or tweets) is to get paid for it. All you need to do is to have a Twitter account and set it to private (or protect your updates so it’s not publicly visible) in your Twitter settings.

Mike Morgan, the creator of the gripe site www.GoldmanSachs666.com (clever Number of the Beast usage there, Mike) did what many bloggers often talk about but rarely do; he went on the legal offensive.

Morgan set up this site at the end of March reports MediaPost, and received every blogger’s dream; a cease and desist letter from corporate America. In this case the lawyers for Goldman Sachs, who just yesterday made headlines by looking to repay TARP funds they received during the Great Bailout of ’09, were concerned that Morgan’s URL would infringe on their trademark.

In a move to help his cause Morgan has since filed a complaint in federal district court in the southern district of Florida stating

With the confirmation that Yahoo and Microsoft have renewed their potential partnership discussions, analysts have taken a look at the new potential deals—and they say that Yahoo stands to benefit in several scenarios. And that’s a good thing, since Yahoo is looking to make its first layoffs since Carol Bartz became CEO in January.

Many analysts are basing their numbers on the terms set forth over the last year of negotiations between the two companies. However, I’m thinking if Carol Bartz were interested in any of those deals, she probably would have come to Ballmer sooner. I think that they’re looking at an entirely different kind of deal, rather than a potential merger or selling off their search division, as the stories went last year.

Imagine this. You have a friend who works for a company that makes peanut and his / her sole purpose at the company is to sell their peanut butter. While there are quite a few peanut butter options there are a few market leaders that tend to dominate. The brand your friend has the laser focused responsibility of selling is one of the top 3 but has a long way to go. One day while visiting his / her home you have lunch and it is, naturally, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You notice, however, that instead of using his own brand of peanut butter he is using the market leader that his existence depends on its overthrow. You ask him “Why aren’t you using your peanut butter?” and his response is “I wouldn’t eat that crap!”, you gotta figure something is amiss, right?

In the all good things must come to end category Efficient Frontier is reporting a 13% drop in paid search spending from their clients which tend to be the big players in the search universe. This number occurred despite an uptick in March.

This is the second consecutive quarter of this trend. Since the previous quarter happened during the holiday season there may be cause for some gloom and doom. The WSJ reports that Google is still doing well and is positioned to whether this storm. Efficient Frontier Chief Executive David Karnstedt stated

Advertisers were in many cases narrowing their keyword selection to search terms that deliver the best bang for their buck, while no longer bidding on less efficient keywords, whose company manages more than $750 million in annual search spending.