Marketing Pilgrim

Well, it’s been a relatively quiet week or so regarding Facebook so let’s see what the talk around town is. It looks to be about Facebook’s valuation and whether they are seeking money or not. Also, if they are seeking some more cash what is it for? Some say a stock buy back from employees. Some say something else. It’s social media’s version of ‘He said, she said’ but the truth must be in there somewhere, right?

After all, we couldn’t continue to function if there was no Facebook, correct? Sorry, it’s early and there isn’t enough coffee in me to cool the sarcasm on this kind of stuff. I realize that by writing about I add to the fray but unfortunately until someone comes up with something that can generate the kind of users that a Facebook or Twitter can we may be stuck with this for a while but I digress.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has a lot to be happy about. Every time he hears a bird he thinks about his success. It seems that he can’t turn around anywhere anymore without hearing something about Twitter and how it is poised to take over the world or at least allows Ashton Kutcher to feel like he has a lot of pals. Interestingly enough, despite the immense success there appears to be little complacency at Twitter but rather a genuine interest in seeing the service do the basics well.

Dorsey recognizes that the retention factor is one that is in need of attention. He talked to Mark Milian of the LA Times last week while in Washington to visit the White House. Rather than talk about the glitz of the nation’s capital he talked about the sign up process for Twitter.

Silicon Alley Insider’s Chart of the Day sums up the recent growth of online advertising revenue–or lack thereof.

Anyone concerned?

(hat-tip)

As the news continues to be troubling at best for the newspaper industry there is going to be an increased focus on those papers that have ventured into that brave new horizon of online editions only. The biggest paper to make that leap in the very recent past is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The announcement that ended the print edition’s run is now 2 months old and data is starting to be gathered as to how this once proud newspaper giant is faring in its new online only state at www.seattlepi.com.

Over at All Things D, Peter Kafka takes a look at what the ‘paper’ is doing these days. He is still predicting that this experiment will fail due to lack of advertising revenue to support even the skeleton crew that remains behind. The article states

Last Friday the much talked about Wolfram Alpha finally went live to the public. The news of an impressive search machine that utilizes Natural Language Processing has captivated the world of search for quite some time now. Being a SOSG myself, I naturally couldn’t wait to get my keyboard humming with queries! Here’s what I found:

My first query was for my company’s primary brand name. This was when I realized that Wolfram Alpha isn’t a search engine by the mainstream definition. Instead of posting a list of web sites Wolfram’s software analyzed the term itself and gave a unique interpretation including the term’s etymology. This would be impressive to say the least, however, my brand name is a completely made up word! That’s extremely impressive!

It is no real surprise that Twitter has application to the SMB (small and medium business) space. There have been success stories talked about for some time no. What is starting to happen, however, that the success the small business has been having is no longer just a business owner stating “Yup, it worked!” According to AdAge two case studies they looked at are starting to put numbers to that success.

Let’s get a small detail out of the way first though. As you can see from the quote below it is likely that the business profiled may have a bit more going for it than the average Mom and Pop or small business.