Marketing Pilgrim

If you prefer to live in the real world you will agree that the job situation in the US is not getting better any time soon. If there are any political pundit types out there who want to duke it out about the what’s and why’s of this situation that’s fine. I’m just stating a fact.

This reality of the times we live in is played out all the time across social media channels. In particular, LinkedIn is the recruiters haven of social media as headhunters who collect connections like the business version of baseball cards. Collect’em all and trade with your friends who need a new VP of something or other. Hey, I’ll trade a VP of Biz Dev for two Directors of marketing!

Pope Benedict XVI has been the Holy See for almost five years, and during that time, he (and the Catholic church along with him) has become more and more involved in social media. Last year, he launched a YouTube channel, social media outreach initiative, and apps for Facebook and the iPhone. And now he’s urging parish priests to follow his lead into the Internet.

And just to show how with-it he really is, this message is from . . . the future. (No, really—it’s dated 16 May 2010.) For the 44th World Communications Day, the Supreme Pontiff noted the advancements in communications thanks to the Internet, and said (will say?):

China has officially, adamantly denied that the government played any role in the recent hack attack against Google and dozens of other firms (with the objective of account info for human rights activists in China). However, another government may have played a part in the attack—the US.

From their first official statement on the matter, China has denied their involvement and condemned the attack. As Agence France-Presse reports, the government is also none too pleased with Google’s accusations:

The “accusation that the Chinese government participated in (any) cyberattack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China,” an unnamed spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told Xinhua.

“We are firmly opposed to that,” the spokesman said.

What do you do when the economy is in the tank and you’re only making $1 a year in salary?

Well, if you’re Google’s Sergey Brin or Larry Page, you dump 15% of your company and pocket a cool $2.75 billion–each!

How does that compare to your emergency fund?

As many places are reporting, Brin & Page aren’t exactly dumping their shares on the market. It’s all part of a quite common practice by majority shareholders:

Under the trading plan, the co-founders would reduce their combined holdings in Google from about 57.7 million common shares, or approximately 18% of outstanding capital stock, to 47.7 million shares, or about 15% of the company, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange filing.

It’s not often that you’ll hear the advice to NOT bother with social media, but a new CMO Council report suggests that when it comes to customer loyalty programs, social media just doesn’t make sense.

While 60% of the 600 marketers polled, planned to make better use of the web and social networking tools, consumers say that’s not how to reach them. In fact, just 4% of consumers say they used social media–dropping to 3% when focusing only on blogs–to learn about customer loyalty programs.

Now, you could argue that the number is at 4% simply because companies are doing a lousy job of promoting their customer loyalty programs via social media, but the CMO Council suggests otherwise:

Web site uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together a nice list of internet stats for 2009. Most of them are from studies and surveys already floating around the web, but Pingdom adds in some of its own metrics.

I had a lot of fun applying my own fuzzy math to a number of the startling statistics.

For example, the number of email users grew 100 million in 2009, to 1.4 billion worldwide. During the same period, email spam increased by 24%, with 81% of all emails being spam.

Now, I know that you can’t assume that 81% of new email users were spammers–one spammer could account for 1% of spam, all on their lonesome–but that just takes away all of the fun!