Marketing Pilgrim

While this may fall into the “too early to tell” category it certainly is of interest, especially considering the pace of Internet ‘news’ these days. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has had a ‘gift’ fall into his lap and a lot of folks are interested to see if he is going to share with the rest of the world. Apparently TechCrunch and others have been handed some confidential Twitter docs and now there is question of what to do with it. The opening paragraph of his post is enough to make anyone curious, at the very least.

Here’s a dilemma: The guy (”Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to us earlier today. The zip file contained 310 documents, ranging from executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs of various Twitter employees.

Honestly, I am not sure what to make of this. Bloomberg has reported that Morgan Stanley, at least its European arm, has produced a report with insights into the mind of one Matthew Robson. He is a 15 year old intern at the securities firm (doing what I might ask?). Apparently this young man has the pulse of every teenager regardless of economic background etc when it comes to how they consume media.

The schoolboy was asked by the bank’s European media analysts to report on what he and his peers look for in the information-entertainment industries. What they got was one of the “clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen,” the analysts said.

Just within the last month there have been reports of the number of defections from Google and the steps that Google has been taking to stop the activity. They may need to ratchet up their efforts however. Hot on the heels of the news that one of their biggest legal eagles has nested elsewhere we learn that there is another mutiny on the good ship Google-pop. TechCrunch reports that

After nearly 5 years with the company, Engineering Director Mark Lucovsky is leaving Google for a role with VMware we’ve learned.
Lucovsky has been an integral part of Google’s APIs, including the all-important Search APIs.

It wouldn’t be the Internet if there wasn’t just as much talk of legal action as there is of innovation. Google knows this better than anyone as they fend off lawsuits on a regular basis that are related (at least loosely in some cases) to their offerings and the apparent lines that are crossed by the search giant. Twitter has gotten a taste of that with the Tony LaRussa impersonation account issue. As a result, Twitter has just landed a bit of a catch by nabbing one of Google’s top lawyers.

According to the NY Times

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, has stolen a prominent Google lawyer.

The start-up has hired Alexander Macgillivray, deputy general counsel for products and intellectual property at Google, to be its general counsel, according to a person with knowledge of the hiring.

Thanks to a long-running business partnership with Social Media Today, we’re able to offer Marketing Pilgrim readers yet another FREE webinar!

The free webinar is hosted by SAP and will take place July 29th at 1:00pm ET/ 10:00am PT on the topic of “The Stimulus Package: What Does it Mean for Your Business?”

Before you dismiss the webinar, thinking “stimulus package, how does that help me?” You might want to reconsider. The panel of experts promise to help you learn:

• How to leverage the $787 billion federal stimulus package: Find out exactly where the federal stimulus package will help your everyday business – and where it won’t. Also discover what you can do to best leverage the funding and tax breaks that are available.

It seems like a new report on social media marketing is released weekly. Today, we see a new report from Razorfish–which surely must help with its attempts to find a knight in shining armor.

Aside from Razorfish’s creation of a new Social Influence Marketing (SIM) Score–which measures the reach and sentiment of your brand in social media–there’s nothing earth-shattering contained in the Fluent report.

Except, perhaps, this:

76% of the 1,000 consumers polled, said they trust their offline friends when making a product purchase decision. Compare that to just 33% who say they trust their online friends!

Clearly, this demonstrates that while social networks might encourage us all to be one big friendly social network, we’re clinging to our old-school definition of friend. It’s somewhat encouraging to see that we’re not collectively being duped into believing that when we add someone as a "friend" we’re instantly BFFs.