Marketing Pilgrim

The arms race between Facebook and Twitter or social media supremacy has its good and bad moments. The good is that all of this ‘one-upsmanship’ should eventually lead to better tools for social media users. The bad news is that we have to hear about every time someone at one of these two companies has a thought.

So today’s update comes from Facebook. According to the WSJ

Facebook Inc. is expected to announce significant plans to open up core parts of its sites — namely the information that appears in the stream of updates on users’ homepages and profiles — to third-party developers so that they can build new services on top of it, people familiar with the matter say.

There were two driving factors behind my launch of Trackur:

1. Existing online reputation monitoring tools were too expensive.
2. Most social media monitoring tools couldn’t be set-up without first studying for a PHD–or getting a 60 minute tutorial from someone with a PHD.

Over the past year or so, we’ve worked hard to add valuable new features to Trackur, but we’ve still maintained our core goals: keep it affordable and keep it simple.

To highlight just how fast and easy it is to set-up Trackur’s sophisticated social media monitoring, we’re announcing the 60-Second Reputation Monitoring Challenge.

We’re so confident that you can get Trackur up and running within 60-seconds, that we’re willing to guarantee it!

Want more details? Head over to the Trackur site or watch the video below:

Today the WSJ tells the tale of eBay and its foray into social media that began in April 2008 with a blog then quickly moved to the world of tweets and tweeple in Twitter. The author of much of the content, Richard Brewer-Hay, spent most of the past year pretty well ‘on his own’ with what he was writing in both vehicles then the corporate version of a buzzkill took place.

The growing Twitter audience also attracted the attention of eBay’s lawyers, who last month required Mr. Brewer-Hay to include regulatory disclaimers with certain posts. Some followers think the tougher oversight is squelching Mr. Brewer-Hay’s spontaneous, informal style.
Financial services and insurance companies have long been hampered by what they can and cannot say that would upset the folks at the SEC and for good reason. Considering the state of the financial industry maybe this didn’t even matter.

Don’t have anything to do this weekend? Wondering how you are going to fill the hours between now and whenever then is for you? How about kicking around the new Google Toolbar Labs for a while. The Google blog announced the new opportunity to test things out and help those crazy Googlers improve on the Google toolbar.

Just as Google Labs and Gmail Labs are playgrounds for new ideas, Toolbar Labs was built to get ideas out there quickly to see how you like them.

The first two Lab versions of the toolbar are interesting and quite different. The first is called Google Toolbar with My Location. This is designed to create the same experience for computer users that was given to the mobile set last September with Mobile Search with My Location.

As we expected…

News Corporation today announced the appointment of Owen Van Natta to the role of MySpace Chief Executive Officer effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be based in Los Angeles and report directly to Jonathan Miller, News Corporation’s CEO of Digital Media and Chief Digital Officer.

You can read the full announcement here.

As previously reported, Yelp has launched a system to allow business owners to address reviews left by their customers.

The new system will finally ease the frustration of businesses not being able to share their side of the story–especially when facing a very negative review. The system will look like this:

Now, before you rub your hands together in delight, Yelp’s well aware of just how over-bearing business owners can be, so it’s going to be very strict in what it will and won’t allow business owners to post. Here are the guidelines for business owners planning to respond:

Public Comment Guidelines

Use public comments to: