Marketing Pilgrim

Congratulations YouTube!

The video site is celebrating over 1 billion views per day and the 3 year anniversary of being acquired by Google with…some nasty spam videos.

No, this just in. YouTube is celebrating with a new logo. The spam is something it doesn’t actually have any control over–and that’s going to be a big problem.

RWW is reporting an uptick in spammy videos posted to YouTube:

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have recorded a mass mailing of spam emails containing a link to a video advertisement on YouTube. Although in the past, spammers have have attempted to lure people into clicking links by claiming the link would display a YouTube video, this is the first case in which the link actually did. In this particular incident, the video in question is a Russian ad promoting industrial real estate.

If you’re one of those people that won’t set up any online reputation monitoring because “you don’t have anything to monitor,” I have a wake-up call for you.

Over at Trackur, we just put together a free list of 30 reputations everyone should be monitoring online.

Thirty! Three, zero! 30!

Honestly, whether you use Trackur or not–which you should by the way–you should have something in place to keep an eye on these 30 reputations.

Download the PDF here.

Google Maps Street View continues its relentless march, despite privacy protests. Google has recently added two new countries to it quiver: Canada and the Czech Republic. Which will be the first to balk?

In Canada, they have added twelve cities in time for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. And naturally, they focused on major metropolises. Metropolii. Uh .. . Anyway, the cities: Vancouver, Whistler (population: 9000), Squamish (population: 15,000! WTG), Banff (populations <7000), Calgary, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax.

And, of course, no Street View would be complete without some strange photos—like a burning van Philipp Lenssen pointed out:

In the Czech Republic, they’ve focused mostly on Prague (ahoj, Praha!), although they did follow Highway D1 as far as Brno.

Who’s in charge of conversions in your company, or at your clients’ companies? Anyone? Maybe it’s time to get on that—a new study by Econsultancy and RedEye, published today, indicates that companies with at least one employee directly responsible for conversions are more likely to improved their conversion rates over the last year.

And it’s not because they’re fudging the numbers to make themselves look good (well . . . probably not). But when you have one person directly responsible for conversions, you have someone you can go to at any moment to know how you’re doing—and what you can do to improve.

What tends to improve conversion rates?

Talk to me long enough about online reputation management and we’ll likely get to the topic of managing online reviews. I truly believe that more of your happy customers would be willing to post a positive review of your business, if only you’d ask!

Well, Empathica has launched a new Facebook application that does just that–encourages your raving fans to tell the world. Called GoRecommend, the app starts as a simply customer survey. Those that demonstrate a favorable experience with a business are prompted to share that positive feedback on Facebook.

Here’s how it looks:

I know it sounds somewhat “icky” but there’s a war going on with your online reputation–and many of you are losing. Your detractors don’t need any prompting to tell their Facebook friends about their dreadful experience with your business. Consider this your chance to level the playing field.

For those of you in a panic over the FTC’s plans to fine bloggers $11,000–each time they don’t disclose a sponsored endorsement–can put down the brown paper bag. It’s not as bad as it appears.

Fast Company asked Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC, a number of questions about the new guidelines.

Here’s the one that will drop your blood pressure back down to normal levels: