Marketing Pilgrim

In what can viewed as either an act of corporate bravery or stupidity all at once, Facebook offered up their vice president of public policy, Eliot Schrage (right), to the readers of the New York Times to answer their questions about, gulp, Facebook and privacy.

While this was not a live event (questions were taken from readers and then given to Facebook to prepare answers) it is an interesting exercise. Of course, Facebook must have “cut a deal” to make sure they put their spin on the current privacy dust-up before answering any questions. Here are a few choice pieces from the “statement” made in the post at the NYT Bits blog.

Here at Marketing Pilgrim we have to keep an eye on everything happening in the Internet marketing space. It takes some doing to accomplish that and using tools to help make sense of all of the buzz out there is critical. We are, of course, very partial to Trackur for our online monitoring needs (maybe you should be too?).

Now, we have received confirmation that the social media monitoring and analytics industry is heading rapidly toward maturity because IBM is getting into the game as well. We say this because IBM isn’t exactly on the leading edge of this type of service. As a result, if there is an official IBM product entry into the space then we are well beyond the “Do you think we should have this at our company?” phase.

What do you find when you look at 41 million Twitter users and 1.87 billion follower/followee relationship? (Aside from a lot of minutiae.) Well, Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science & Technology found that when it comes to Twitter, people really aren’t that interested in being social. More than 3 in 4 —78%—of all Twitter connections are not reciprocated.

By contrast, says KAIST, Yahoo 360 has an 84% reciprocation rate (that is, only 16% of relationships aren’t reciprocated). Even Flickr has more than three times the reciprocation rate of Twitter—68%. Twitter, then, appears to be less of a social interaction sphere and more of a news broadcasting medium.

Skype, one of the (if not the) most popular video conferencing applications out there, has long run on free conferencing and chat, with some paid services including connecting to telephone numbers. They were in the news last year as then-owner eBay promised an IPO to spin them off in H12010. Then they sold most of the company, but that deal was challenged by a lawsuit from Skype’s founders. Eventually, eBay settled the deal, leaving the founders with 14% of the company, the new buyers 56% of the company, and eBay 30%.

But apparently they’re struggling for income and their existing paid services just aren’t bringing in enough. Last year, eBay wrote Skype down last year (and an impairment charge two years ago)—suggesting the company never lived up to eBay’s expectations in the deal. Now that they’re (mostly) on their own again, Skype is contemplating advertising on its signature free services.

I’m pretty sure that when you hear the word “referral” at least 50% of you think of a search engine or web site referral. But what about honest-to-goodness business referrals from friends, customers, coworkers, and business partners?

That’s something the Joe touched on a few weeks back and now we have 3 copies of John Jantsch’s new book: The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself.

John Jantsch. John Jantsch? Where have I heard that name before? He’s only the bestselling author of Duct Tape Marketing–so you know this new book is going to be worth your time. Some of Jantsch’s advice includes:

• Talk with your customers, not at them. Thanks to social networking sites, companies of any size have the opportunity to engage with their customers on their home turf as never before—but the key is listening.

Could it be that privacy truly is Facebook’s achilles heel?

The world’s #1 social network is already seeing users cancel their account in droves–over privacy–and now one of its trusted partners provides the gateway for a malicious hack?

One of Facebook’s marque personalization partners, Yelp, is at the center of the latest privacy scare. Actually, a scare would be putting it mildly:

The script in my example would capture the browser cookies set for Yelp.com, extract a key required to make Open Graph API requests to the Facebook API, and send that key to my site. My site would then make a request for your name, email, etc. and store it in a database.

Even more scary?