Marketing Pilgrim

The Telegraph reports on the rise in syphilis in several English communities—cities in Britain where Facebook is the most popular. Professor Peter Kelly, director of public health in Teesside, publicly announced that they had, in fact, found a “link” between the two.

And by “link,” he means “cum hoc, ergo propter hoc.” That’s Latin for “correlation doesn’t imply causation”—Facebook’s response to the allegations. (Okay, really, the Latin translation is “with this, therefore because of this,” and is a logical fallacy.)

I think it should be fairly obvious that Facebook use can’t directly cause syphilis. (As I understand it, there still needs to be physical contact for the transmission of everything but computer viruses—and yes, Facebook can enable those hook ups, but really, the people still make those decisions. Come on.) There may actually be some relationship here—but most likely there are other variables affecting the findings, too. (Perhaps sexually promiscuous individuals are more “socially promiscuous” online, on any social network.)

Ever since Google first began its threats to leave China (which they finally made good on this week), it’s seemed like a bit of a logical leap to see what a hack attack had to do with the country’s government-mandated censorship—something Google agreed to when it entered the market in 2006.

But the hackers—and their target—were just one piece of the puzzle, according to an Atlantic interview with Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond. Although Google has survived dozens of hacking attempts, the targets of this particular attempt were all political activists (emphasis added):


That was distasteful to us. It seemed to us that this was all part of an overall system bent on suppressing expression, whether it was by controlling internet search results or trying to surveil activists. It is all part of the same repressive program, from our point of view. We felt that we were being part of that.

Sounds scary doesn’t it? Well, apparently behavioral targeting is music to advertisers ears because the technique works. Of course, this very same practice is what makes the hairs on the back of the neck of government regulators stand on end. The controversial and growing practice is going to be around though until it is asked to leave the building. Why? It converts.

cnet tells us some more

Want to get digital-policy regulator types fired up? Start talking about behavioral ad targeting, the business of serving up digital ads that are fine-tuned to a user’s Web surfing habits, and you’re sure to get all kinds of wildly varied opinions about privacy and sensitive data.

We haven’t heard much from bing as of late so it makes sense that they would use SES NYC to make a few announcements about their Google slaying search engine bing. Of course, it would be a little more interesting if there were announcements of actual product enhancements rather than the following from the bing blog:

Today at SES New York we shared with attendees our plans to begin testing some new Bing features as we start to move into the next wave of innovation which will be rolling out later this spring and summer.

A search engine walks into a bar, and the bartender says…

“Why the long face?”

Not laughing? Neither is Google after being fined by a Brazilian court for not blocking pages of dirty jokes from its Orkut social network:

The court in the northern state of Rondonia ordered Google to pay $US2700 for each day that the pages remained up, and told it to stop similar material being posted.

Google tried to argue that it didn’t have the means to censor Orkut, but the judge suggested otherwise:

The court noted that Google already implemented such curbs on its pages in China…

Clearly this judge has not been reading the news!

Giving all of the credit to the first click is “like giving all of the credit for marrying my wife to my first girlfriend.”

That my friend, is typical of web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik. If you think that web analytics is boring, you’ve clearly never heard Avinash give a presentation!

You can read the full transcript of his SES NYC keynote here. [Congrats to Nathania for keeping up with him!]

You can get a taste of the sheer awesomeness of Avinash here: