Marketing Pilgrim

In all honesty, there is not much to talk about at the start of a week that truly moving toward the dog days of summer. Let’s take one more look at the Sun Valley meeting of last week to see if a gathering of the most influential media executives can garner something of interest. Errr…..not really. Best we can come up with is the Wall Street Journal report that MySpace is looking to focus on the entertainment space. Shocking! I feel like such a slacker when I get blindsided by this kind of breaking news. It’s now very apparent that if we didn’t have these kinds of meetings of these great minds we wouldn’t have the kind of insight and wisdom unavailable to us commoners like the following

Rosetta Stone, the company that makes the software that can help you learn any language (according to their advertising that is) is joining the line of companies who are suing Google over trademark infringement in AdWords campaigns. The Washington Post reports says that the company has filed their suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia

Rosetta Stone asked the court to stop Google from allowing other firms — including competitors — to use its trademarks to sell ads associated with online searches.

“Google and its advertisers benefit financially from and trade off the goodwill and reputation of Rosetta Stone without incurring the substantial expense that Rosetta Stone has incurred in building up its popularity, name recognition and brand loyalty,” Michael Wu, general counsel of Rosetta Stone, said in a statement.

The Sun Valley media and technology conference opened Wednesday. We like to make fun of the confab of media moguls and owners as “navel gazing” (hence the pun in the post title!)—I mean, a media conference that’s closed to the press?—but since the press seems to be swarming around outside the conference and lots of people seem willing to talk, I guess it’s time to fire up the ol’ rumor mill.

First up, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. In a press conference last night, Schmidt said he tried for six years to save us from Chrome and the pending Google OS, but eventually the wave of enthusiasm that is Larry Page and Sergey Brin overpowered his objections:

Google is still going about its search business despite the flurry of activity around its Chrome OS and all other things Google. Today, on the Official Google Blog, they announced the introduction of better, more comprehensive search results for places.

Using our Universal Search technology, we have provided maps in our search results for more than two years. However, as any traveler could tell you, knowing the geographical location of a place is only part of the story. It’s often just as valuable to get a sense of what the place is like, and there’s no better way to do that than by looking at images of some of its most important sights.

Rather than just heist the images they used I did some exploring myself. Raleigh, NC and Cary, NC (neighboring ‘cities’) each had their own map and pictures.

It’s a saga we’re all familiar with by now: create a pretty awesome web service, start a trend, become a media sweetheart, make lots of money (VC or acquisition), get slapped with a lawsuit. Or two. Or fifty billion. Facebook added two more lawsuits to its heap recently: a countersuit from Power.com and a click fraud proceeding.

Facebook filed suit against Power.com in December. Facebook claimed the one-stop social-media aggregator was infringing upon their copyright, violating their TOS and scraping proprietary data. At the time, we weren’t sure whether “proprietary data” included user information.

Power.com finally decided not to take this sitting down. TechCrunch reports that Power.com has now filed a countersuit, claiming Facebook is “unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS), and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services like Power.com to access the data, among other things.”

I’d imagine a lot of us can relate to the nightmare that surrounds having to complain to any airline–especially when it comes to lost or damaged luggage.

So, you can imagine the frustration endured by singer/songwriter Dave Carroll as he tried to get United Airlines to pay for $1200 of damages to his guitar. After eight months of back and forth with United, Carroll decided to write the whimsical "United Breaks Guitars," record a video, and post it to YouTube.

1,351,943 views later, United is finally paying attention to Carroll.

…spokeswoman Robin Urbanski declared Tuesday that “this has struck a chord with us.” On Wednesday, she added that “his video is excellent, and we plan to use it internally as a unique learning and training opportunity to ensure that all our customers receive better service…. This should have been fixed much sooner.”