Marketing Pilgrim

I can hear it now. We normal folks won’t be able to hear this signal (kind of like a dog whistle) but this is being sounded across the US to Washington, DC from Mountain View, CA as we speak.

“Calling all ex-Google employees in DC! Calling all ex-Google employees in DC! (Especially if you still have stock) I repeat – Calling all ex-Google employees in DC! This is your real leader, Eric Schmidt, and we need you to ‘talk’ to some people about this ‘problem’ that the US government has with our book deal. Remember where your allegiance is and who is more powerful. Go and do your duty for the Goog immediately. Thanks and have a great day!”

Online reputation management isn’t always about big corporate brands. In fact, half of my book Radically Transparent is dedicated to building and managing personal reputations.

Just in case you’re not convinced that you need to worry about your personal reputation online, you might want to check out the interview I did with WCCO Radio:

Listen to the Radio Interview

In it I discuss three important themes:

1. How your social networking profiles can hurt your career and job hunting.
2. How debt collectors are tracking people down via social networks.
3. How scammers and thieves are praying on the naive.

If you’re not an audio person, the same advice was recently published on Yahoo Finance via an interview I did with Bankrate.com.

Facebook has begun introducing a new home page redesign to about 20% of the total 400 million ‘users’ of the social media platform. It appears as if the gist of the changes are just moving certain elements to different parts of the page so they can get more attention from users. More usage of the functionality means more stickiness means more opportunities to make cash. It’s that simple. Inside Facebook tells us

First off, a lot more people are engaging with notifications in the new design, Facebook’s Peter Deng tells us, which isn’t surprising since it’s at the top left-hand side of the site instead of the right hand of the bottom toolbar. Notifications for third parties will appear within the new interface for the rest of the month, until Facebook removes them on March 1.

And not in the positive “I now know 999 ways not to make a light bulb” way.

AOL’s Q4—their first earnings report since spinning off from Time Warner—numbers have all kinds of red ink and negative signs in front of them: display advertising revenue down 3% total YOY, international display down 22%, search and contextual down 19%, total ad revenue down 8%, subscription revenue down 28%, Other revenue down 5%. The only gain YOY was in US display advertising: a whopping 1%. And despite total revenues being down 17%, AOL still handily beat Wall Street expectations.

Yes, failure = success when people expect almost nothing of you. Says All Things D:

After factoring out one-time charges, AOL posted earnings of 71 cents per share on revenues of $801 million. Wall Street expected earnings of either 62 cents or 66 cents per share, depending on who you ask, on revenue of around $766 million.

Does your company have a formal policy on employee social media usage during the work day (or after)? If not, you’re not alone: a report from employment services firm Manpower shows that only 29% of companies have a formal social media policy in place.

Obviously, far more companies block popular social media sites—another study in October showed that half of all companies block YouTube, Facebook and/or Twitter. But, as Mashable points out, those two stats aren’t mutually exclusive: there’s a difference between a written policy and simply avoiding the issue with blocking sites.

Over the past few weeks I have been watching the Toyota recall fiasco out of the corner of my eye. It began as a news story (which is different than its actual start date) and it has not gone away. Well, you know the online “you know what” has hit the fan when you can go to Comedy Central’s site and see this

Now, it appears that Toyota has really done some serious long-term damage to one of the most respected brands in the world. How? By being slow to react and being aloof enough to give enough fodder to someone like Jon Stewart to skewer them. Sure Jon’s not NBC, ABC or CBS but he’s more influential