Marketing Pilgrim

According to an article in the New York Times, Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently hinted to friends at an LA party that Google is working on their own tablet running the Android operating system.

With the relatively slow adoption rate of the Google phone Nexus One, one has to wonder why Google would want to venture into producing its own hardware again. Of course the tablet market and the phone market are two different creatures so perhaps the challenges Google is facing in getting people to give up their iPhones won’t be as pronounced with the tablet.

From a marketing perspective this could be very interesting. Mobile advertising is still in its infancy and who will control this lucrative advertising sector is still unclear. Apple’s new ad network iAd is poised to be the 800 pound gorilla and with iPhone penetration at all time highs and iPad sales through the roof, Apple may win by default.

It’s notoriously difficult to measure the value of social media—but apparently not impossible. Social media specialist Vitrue looked at its clients’ data for Facebook to determine exactly how much a Facebook fan is worth, as AdWeek reports, and they came up with a number: $3.60.

Vitrue’s clients boast a combined 41 million Facebook fans. For the most part, each fan yielded an extra impression. They assumed twice-daily posts bringing in 60M impressions and used a $5 CPM, “meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month. Using Vitrue’s calculation, Starbucks’ 6.5 million fan base — acquired in part with several big ad buys — is worth $23.4 million in media annually.”

Last summer, Gawker announced a new comment system for all their sites. The change meant that comments wouldn’t be displayed solely based on ratings or timing—instead, they would be ranked according to the popularity/usefulness/awesomeness of the commenter. Particularly popular/useful/awesome commenters would even get the power to promote comments by lesser beings to the higher tier. Unapproved commenters could get their comments displayed on a case-by-case basis.

Sounds like a recipe for rebellion, doesn’t it? You’d think people would be less interested in contributing to a site that apparently no longer wanted their comments—especially since they also abandoned the existing system of giving commenters with more followers more clout. But not the case for Gawker: since they implemented tiered commenting, after an initial decline, comment participation has skyrocketed.

Google is truly acting like the search engine it is by offering a new opportunity for searching archived tweets to see what was being said at a set time in the past. One of the shortcomings of Twitter search has been the relatively short shelf life of a tweet to be searched. Twitter is not a search engine and doesn’t have the capability to archive every tweet that ever was.

That’s where Google jumps in. As a result you now can have a rather rich source of data that can be used for research and just about anything else. While social media makes the ‘now’ important Google takes that moment and can paint a picture of the ‘now’ in a more complete way. The Google blog tells us more

Everything about the Internet is about sharing. Not necessarily sharing in the singing “Kumbaya” around the campfire sense although some social media wants this result. It’s more about simple information sharing. Knowledge transfer. Schedule updates. Not the sexy stuff but actually the basic and most critical stuff.

Yesterday at Google’s Atmosphere event CEO Eric Schmidt said that these very basic needs are what pose the greatest challenge to the brains behind the Goog: the engineers. GigaOm tells us more

Schmidt made two specific comments about resource allocation, saying that the hardest and most pressing engineering issues facing Google today are around sharing and mobile.

He further built on the sharing concept by using the following example. Of course, this wouldn’t be an E. Schmidt production if there wasn’t a shot fired across the bow of one of Google’s major competitors. This time Microsoft was the target.

Yahoo is adding a whole new layer to real time. Yesterday, they announced the Updates Firehose for developers, “a web service for accessing and searching the full, real-time index of Yahoo! Updates.” And that includes all Yahoo properties—from Flickr to Delicious to comments on news stories. All public information posted on the service goes into the Firehose.

Naturally, developers can filter the information and manipulate it using Yahoo’s own Yahoo Query Language (YQL), an SQL-like query language. Developers can use it to call common keywords used across all updates or restrict the info to updates from a specific application, location, language, URL or type (e.g., status updates, ratings, comments, and reviews).

The updates included in the Firehose make it apparent the service is appropriately named: