Marketing Pilgrim

If you’re going to produce a viral video packed with stunning facts, then the secret to its success is to use Fatboy Slim’s "Right Here, Right Now" as the theme song–I’ve lost track of the number of videos that use that track.

Still, that doesn’t stop this video from being any less fascinating than the many that have gone before it.

Enjoy!

(via)

Facebook is gearing up to face off with the government again—this time over privacy concerns in two different venues: the California courts and a Canadian commission.

In California, five users are suing Facebook for disclosing their information to third parties for commercial purposes, without the users’ permission. The plaintiffs are two children under the age of 13 (who, BTW, aren’t allowed to use the site according to the TOS), a user of the “original Facebook,” a model/actress and a photographer. They argue that Facebook violated California consumer privacy laws. They’re looking for a trial, damages and fees. Facebook, naturally, says they “see no merit to this suit and . . . plan to fight it.”

In a survey conducted before Bing launched, Google was the most satisfying search engine, according to Search Engine Land. The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business report, conducted by the University of Michigan, is funded by Foresee Results.

Out of a perfect 100, Google scored 86 on the satisfaction index, scored on several criteria about the search experience. Interestingly, that’s identical to its score last year. In fact, none of the three major search engines changed YOY—Yahoo held steady at 77 and MSN stayed at 75.

It seems Dave Carroll is not done teaching United Airlines a lesson or two on the consequences of poor customer service. As a follow-up to his viral hit United Breaks Guitars, Carroll has released a new video:

Really, the damage was done with the posting of the first video and United has learned enough from this lesson. As United Airlines’ Barbara Higgins told Christopher Elliott:

We understand the power of social media and the implications it has on our reputation, and realize it has a role in our communicating to our guests and the public at large. We also put the highest priority on making things right directly with our customer in the most helpful, meaningful and immediate manner, and most often that means picking up the phone and calling them, rather than using social media to talk to everyone about one person’s personal travel experience. So, like most things, it’s a combination of ways to connect to our guests.

Can you believe it’s been 3 years since Google first offered free WiFi to Mountain View, CA residents? I remember thinking, "It won’t be long before Google offers free WiFi all around the country!"

I’m still waiting.

Maybe I should move to Mountain View, because it appears the Google-sponsored free WiFi is a roaring success–with 19,000 users and 600 gigabytes of data transferred each day. Not bad for a coverage area of just 12 square miles.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Google has seen a steady increase in the number of handheld devices accessing its WiFi hotspot:

Google knows what you’re going to be searching for in 12 months from now! OK, maybe not all the things you’ll Google–it can’t predict the next celebrity scandal or social media phenom–but, for general search queries, it knows all about you.

In a new white paper just released, Google reveals how its working to predict future search trends.

I’m not a mathematician, so appreciated this basic summary:

For each trends sequence of interest, we take a point in time, t, which is about a year back, compute a one year forecasting for t based on historical data available at time t, and compare it to the actual trends sequence that occurs since time t. The error between the forecasting trends and the actual trends characterizes the predictability level of a sequence, and when the error is smaller than a pre-defined threshold, we denote the trends query as predictable.