Marketing Pilgrim

While we concentrate on Internet marketing here at Marketing Pilgrim 99% of the time we also like to take time to recognize things of true importance.

Along those lines, we just want to say thank you to all of the men and women who serve in the Armed Forces of the United States for their sacrifice. We thank their families as well and, of course, we honor those who have served in the past and given so much so we can have so much. Personally, I proudly include my grandfather who was killed during World War II in the Battle of the Bulge at the age of 22. No matter where you stand politically or ideologically it’s important to recognize what has been done and what is being done for us every second of every day.

The Internet is amazing place. Only online can unicorns go in search of Candy Mountain, babies dance their hearts out, and cats can LOL. With the Internet we can connect with friends we haven’t spoken to in 20 years. And we can meet new amazing people every day. Because of all of these amazing things the Internet can do, it’s no surprise that many small business owners think the Internet can perform magic for their small business. However, what many fail to realize is often starting a business on the Internet can be more challenging than starting one off-line.

While geo-location services often have trouble pinpointing exact location (studies have shown that 40% of the time they are inaccurate) that hasn’t hampered the growth of foursquare. In fact, the exponential growth of checkins is starting to produce numbers that boggle the mind. As marketers it is now getting to the point where ignoring the trend will come at your own risk.

Mashable reports

A tweet from Foursquare yesterday revealed that the company is doing “10+ checkins per second.” We did the math and at 10 checkins per second, Foursquare is processing about 36,000 checkins per hour — putting the daily checkin total somewhere around 864,000.

In fact, once Foursquare hits 11.58 checkins per second — a milestone foreseeable in the very near future — it will be processing over 1 million checkins per day.

It’s a pretty well known fact that B2B marketers have been slower on the adoption curve of social media. We are not breaking news here at all. What’s always of interest though is the degree to which these two groups are separated and the reasons for this gap existing.

eMarketer and White Horse, a digital marketing agency, have done some work in this area and found that it could be as simple as the degree of executive level ‘buy in’ for social media that is responsible for the B2C space being much more receptive to social media as a true marketing / advertising / PR play. One third of the respondents for B2B claimed low executive level acceptance while that only happened 9% of the time for B2C.

Google is always very busy making changes to its search ranking methodology and the mythical algorithm that everyone chases. I say mythical only because for years it has been treated as if it were something that could be hunted, captured, contained, analyzed and then completely understood. That’s the marketing and sales talk about this beast. Reality is much different.

Reality is so much different that people who know more than most, like former Googler Vanessa Fox, often tell folks to not get their knickers in a twist about every adjustment in the Google search ‘ecosystem’. Last year alone there were anywhere from 350-550 changes made so there is no way to A) know all of these B) Implement all of these and C) Not go crazy tracking all of these.

I don’t get very excited about many things that are touted as innovation in the Internet marketing space. Why? It’s because everyone wants to hype the newest and freshest updates to their service as a “game changer!” or some other form of hyperbole that always easily out runs the reality of the service. In other words, I am tired of being hyped (am I the only one here on this one?).

This time, however, I am pretty interested in the Google Moderator integration into YouTube that is being introduced. At first glance this looks like it gives the world of video a new level of interactivity that can actually create a better experience for the end user. How about that! The YouTube blog tells us more: