Marketing Pilgrim

Ah, Hulu. How we made fun of thee. How we love thee now. Unless, of course, we live outside the United States—then we kind of hate thee for not letting us watch your shows. Although they planned to launch to the British Isles in September 2009, that has been delayed until 2010—and naturally, that vacuum is being filled. Competitor SeeSaw is set to open in beta tomorrow with three content licenses in place.

Hulu’s plans to expand into the UK and Ireland were slated to include their American content as well as content from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. ITV now almost certainly will not participate (yet). Licensing agreements with American networks originally kept the service from expanding; rumor has it that Hulu’s demands for exclusive content licensing with British networks have been a major stumbling block. Channel 4, for example, has already licensed its content to YouTube and SeeSaw.

Last week, Google announced they would soon begin building high-speed broadband networks. They’re currently taking requests to select the markets where they’ll begin—but it’s still not too soon for at least one former FCC chair to endorse the idea.

Former FCC chairman Michael K. Powell, blogging for Broadband for America, says that Google’s effort is further proof that network investment and innovation matter to the future of the Internet. Google’s success is built upon the success of the Internet, he says, and as Internet speeds improve, so does access to Google and the vast stores of information on the Internet.

Basically, Powell encourages the current FCC board not to block Google’s move into the ISP realm:

Whether it is here or on some of the other places that I write about SMB Internet marketing, I talk a lot about the plight of the SMB (small and medium business) with regard to online marketing. Despite the size of the market that the SMB represents it has always been under served.

There are a few basic reasons for this. Most SMB owners don’t have the resources whether they be money, knowledge or skilled employees that can carry out Internet marketing and social media campaigns. The biggest barrier in this marketplace is likely money because credit for the SMB is incredibly tight thus making it harder to pay for advertising and promotions as cash flow is suffering as well.

For all of you complaining about the way Google Buzz invaded your privacy, the search engine has a perfectly simply explanation for you:

It didn’t really care!

OK, so Google hasn’t actually come out and made that statement, but it doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines:

The BBC understands that Buzz was only tested internally and bypassed more extensive trials with external testers – used for many other Google services…Many of the firm’s new services are tested by the so-called Google Trusted Tester program…Buzz was not tested by this program.

So basically, Google decided not to conduct its normal rigorous internal testing AND didn’t place Buzz in Google Labs–like it does with just about every other experimental new product. That leaves us to reason that either Google didn’t care, didn’t think, or got greedy.

You have probably heard or are somewhat aware of the Kevin Smith / Southwest Airlines dust up over the past few days. If you haven’t then you are missing an online reputation monitoring and management real life case study unfold right before your eyes.

The main player is screenwriter, film producer, and director Kevin Smith. Smith is famous for his movies Clerks, Dogma, Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. If you have seen any of these movies you know where his sense of humor lies. Let’s just say it’s not family fare. His has developed a loyal following and that following has moved to Twitter where he has nearly 1.7 million followers. When you get to numbers like that and the person who has those numbers is a genuine influencer (not some spammer) there can be genuine power involved.

Now this looks familiar.

A new survey by Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University, suggests that 89% of journalists source their stories from blogs, 65% from social networks such as Facebook, and 52% from Twitter.

That’s no surprise.

Yet despite this admission, journalists continue to downplay the importance of social media to their reporting efforts, with just 15% citing it as “important.”

Hmm, does that seem to you like a profession not wanting to admit that citizen-journalists and content creators are making their job obsolete?

Breaking down the data, we see that those journalists writing for web publications are more likely (69%) to use social media for news sources, than those writing for magazines (48%).