Marketing Pilgrim

I just noticed that my number of tweets just skyrocketed, according to Twitter.

Apparently, I tweeted 34,000 tweets overnight!

Here’s Google’s cache from last night:

And here’s what’s showing right now:

I’m not the only one to see this. My wife’s just jumped around 10,000 too.

Anyone else seeing this?

UPDATE: While this is annoying–I don’t want to appear as though I’m a tweeting windbag–it’s a known, low-priority bug, according to Twitter.

If you’re a government conspiracy theorist, you probably shouldn’t read this post. You won’t sleep for weeks.

The National Security Agency is rumored to be working with Google in light of the cyber attacks that reportedly came from China.

Think about that for a second. Big Brother just partnered with big brother, to try and fight off communist China.

Doesn’t that make you just feel so warm and fuzzy?

No one is publicly admitted that the NSA and Google are collaborating, but the source of the story isn’t some blogger looking for publicity, it’s The Washington Post–so there must be some smoke surrounding this alleged fire.

“The critical question is: At what level will the American public be comfortable with Google sharing information with NSA?” said Ellen McCarthy, president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

When people in the industry or anywhere else for that matter look to C-level participation in social media Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is viewed as a pioneer. He was the first Fortune 500 CEO to blog. Well, now he has broken some new ground by being the first CEO of his stature (or maybe any for that matter) to tweet his resignation. Yup, he’s given his last 140 characters on behalf of Sun Microsystems.

The New York Times Bits column says:

Jonathan Schwartz, the last chief executive of Sun Microsystems, has become the first Fortune 200 boss to tweet his resignation.

Late Wednesday night, Mr. Schwartz used Twitter to publish a haiku about his exit from Oracle, which just completed its purchase of Sun last week.

According to a new study by Econsultancy and ExactTarget, marketers face a conundrum when it comes to increasing their online marketing budgets in 2010.

They want to do it, but 40% of those surveyed simply don’t have the budget to spend more on marketing this year.

What to do; what to do?

I know, let us reduce our spending on print ads (41%), radio (36%), and TV (31%):

And channel those funds into Facebook and Twitter (70%), blogging (64%), and SEO (64%):

Let’s hope these companies–and their agencies–can quickly figure out their ROI from social networking. Right now, only 17% of marketers say they have a good understanding of how sites such as Facebook and Twitter convert–compared to paid search ads (54%). Though those numbers stack up well against their current ROI measurement of print and radio, so maybe there’s hope.

When you think about geotagging, what do you think of? GPS coordinates appended to a Tweet? Picking the location you took a photo on Flickr?

How about notes from your friends? As customary, the US Patent Office recently published a patent filed by Yahoo in July 2008, and in that patent, geotagging takes on a whole new meaning. Instead of assigning pictures a location, you can actually leave notes at a location, accessible via mobile, and networked with your friends. Want to let your friends know what your favorite restaurant is? Add a tag. When they’re in the area, their phone will let them know about your tag. And that’s just the beginning.

YouTube conducted its first test of a video rental service last month with five independent films from Sundance Film Festival. In the ten days of the test, the rentals received a total of 2684 views, according to the New York Times. At $3.99 a pop, YouTube brought in $10,709.16.

If YouTube could sustain both of those rates on rentals at large, they’re looking at more than $390,000 a year in revenue. That’s close to offsetting waaaay off the largest loss estimate from last year and more than enough to turn a profit if even the more conservative loss estimates.

The original blog post announcement doesn’t say how much of the revenue, if any, will be shared with the independent filmmakers. The additional exposure may be worth the money to the filmmakers, of course.