Marketing Pilgrim

Facebook is going to be joining the frenzy to help everyone not only know what people are thinking but also where they are thinking it. As we move more toward a world of this total view of another’s life you can be sure that Facebook wants to be involved. With the rising popularity of Foursquare, Gowalla and other location based “services” it makes sense that Facebook be here. In the bigger picture, however, this is likely to be more about taking on Google for local advertising dollars. After all, money has to be made correct?

The New York Times Bits section reports

Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Unlike last time, there’ll be no snafu about whether the time is right to reveal the new MSN Homepage–it’s now officially live for all.

New features include:

• TrendWatch – Highlights the day’s top trends and movers on Twitter
• Hyper-local Tweets – Uses the power of Bing to highlight tweets from your location, available on the new Local Edition
• My Cities – Personalize MSN Local Edition and save up to 3 cities to follow – making it easy to keep up with your friends or family across the entire country

You should already see the new design at MSN.com or you can head here: http://www.msn.com/preview.aspx

Thoughts?

Flying under the radar with your affiliate income is about to get a lot harder for US tax payers. Starting next year, the IRS will be tracking all online payments made through credit, debit and electronic payment processing like PayPal. The new 1099-K form will be provided by any bank or payment settlement company operating in those areas.

Even better, these forms will include only the gross amounts—i.e. the payments made excluding any fees these companies or other intermediaries may charge—or returns, chargebacks or refunds.. As most of us well know, a payment of $100 often doesn’t translate into a profit of $100, so it will be on the merchants’ shoulders to report all fees among other business expenses.

Facebook and Eventbrite already have a relationship—Facebook tapped the event site to sell tickets to its f8 developer conference, as confirmed by TechCrunch last week. A TechCrunch reader then noticed that facebook.eventbrite.com was up and working:

So, TechCrunch speculates, might Eventbrite and Facebook be partnering to make Facebook (and Eventbrite, of course) money on the 3.5M events posted on the social site? When Facebook added the Events feature, plenty thought this would spell the death of dedicated event or invitation sites. However, most of these events (that I’ve seen, anyway) are personal-level things—with free admission. But I’m Eventbrite would be happy to help Facebook expand into event ticket sales for everything from fundraisers to concerts. (Eventbrite also coordinates free tickets, for free.)

Says TechCrunch:

According to a new study being published this week by Unica, European marketers trail their American cousins, when it comes to the adoption of social media marketing.

While, 58% of marketers in North America are already engaged in social media marketing, only 34% of Europeans can say the same.

That’s likely to change in the next 12 months:

Some quick math suggests that this time next year, 76% of American marketers will be knee deep in social media marketing, with an impressive game of "catch-up" played by European counterparts–hitting 64% adoption.

So what’s keeping Europe from making this a photo-finish? Well, the biggest set-back is the 20% of European marketers that don’t want anything to do with social media. Not, "we’re more than 12 months out" or "we not sure yet" but flat out "we have no plans for social media marketing."

Being a resident of North Carolina I have had the experience of watching the state government take away an income stream for people in a time when income streams can be little more like a trickle. It did this through imposing a tax on Amazon affiliate sales in the state and Amazon essentially said “No problem, we’ll just remove the program from your residents reach”. I marveled at what can only be seen as utter stupidity on the surface (I say on the surface because that’s where I sit and have no other details) as the government pulled the rug out from under its own citizens thus removing dollars from the North Carolina economy over a dispute about the tax on those transactions. The state essentially threw out the baby, the bathwater and the tub. Way to go NC state government!