Marketing Pilgrim

As you know, a couple of weeks ago (my company) Trackur launched Trackur Free–a competely free version of the popular social media monitoring tool.

To celebrate Trackur Free’s success–and to get as many people protecting their reputation as possible–Trackur is now giving all users a chance to win a free Apple iPad!

Yep, you can get your hands on a free online reputation monitoring tool AND enter to win the hottest gadget around!

Want to enter? Head over to the Trackur site pronto!

I know that what I am about to say is not original but it really struck me that as Twitter announces that it is offering location based information on its site there is so little reported about the potential issues this may create.

I think it struck me because the Twitter site is usually the last place where the cool ideas are implemented. Location based mobile apps for Twitter are nothing new and with the increasing popularity of foursquare and others this craze seems to have some serious legs. This is all the more evident if the Twitter site is climbing on board.

Mashable reports on Twitter’s efforts with the following picture and quote which pretty much tells the story.

Wouldn’t it make sense that if you spent more money on email marketing than pay-per-click marketing, you’d have a reasonable explanation for that choice?

Well, according to the data discovered in Econsultancy’s 2010 Email Marketing Census, companies are spending more on email marketing (17% of online budgets) than PPC (16%) despite not fully understanding the return on investment (ROI) achieved or taking advantage of one of the most important benefits of email marketing: segmentation.

When you run PPC campaign, you attempt to segment your target audience by using different ad creative and targeted landing pages. You wouldn’t bring a “window shopper” to a landing page that displayed only one product, would you? So it’s a shock that many companies are still not using segmentation to target their email campaigns and deliver messages, or offers, that are tailored to their customers’ known interests and buying habits. Think about that. When you email your existing customers, you already know at least a little about their buying preferences, so why would you not segment them so that they receive tailored email messages?

Google does what Google does and it has now opened the doors on an apps marketplace that is designed for Google Apps customers. Don’t think the overlap in terminology with the other app guys is coincidence either. The difference with this form of app though is the fundamental difference that separates Google from Apple. Google provides apps that are fundamental business needs and this strategy is where the search giant appears to be hanging its hat moving forward relating to search, advertising and more.

Yesterday the Official Google blog reported:

Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.

“You would have to be stupid. You would have to trip to not succeed at this at some point.”

Those words may come back to haunt the former Bebo chief Joanna Shields, now that rumors are circulating that the social network is about to be dropped like a hot potato.

Back when AOL bought Bebo for $850 million, I was already speculating that the social network had slipped from its valuation high of $1.5 billion. Now it appears that the social network has lost users–down from 22 million a month to 14.6 million–and with it, it’s value to AOL.

What’s interesting is the predicament facing AOL. Due to some complex tax laws, it may actually make better financial sense for AOL to just shut Bebo down.

OneUpWeb recently released the results of an eye-tracking study on Google’s new real-time results integrated into SERPs—and it looks like the search giant might have just wasted $15M (the estimated cost of Google’s deal with Twitter).

The study segmented web users into two groups: consumers and information foragers. It took consumers 7.09 seconds to look at the real-time results, even though they’re listed just below the news results and before the organic results. In fact, they scrolled below the fold to view the image results before they fixated on the real-time area, the eleventh area they focused on.