Marketing Pilgrim

Human rights group Amnesty International is launching a social media campaign on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and through bloggers, designed to raise money for a full page ad buy attacking oil company Shell in a UK national newspaper.

According to an article in the Guardian Newspaper:

“Amnesty’s full-page ad, which is being timed to coincide with Shell’s annual general meeting on 18 May, attacks the oil company for alleged environmental transgressions in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.”

All politics aside, there are a few things I really like about this campaign from Amnesty.

Clear Goals

The proposition is simple: Donate money, help Amnesty buy a nationwide newspaper ad, and stick it to man. The audience is presented with specific requirements and a clearly spelled out reward.

No, this isn’t the Biz Center as in Biz Stone’s foray into shared office space. Nope, this is Twitter’s move to offer specific business services that will enhance Twitter’s abilities to serve the business community. Eventually this will be another one of those things that will maybe even help Twitter, ummmmm, make money. How about that?

Mashable reports on the new Twitter Business Center which

According to the company, “only a handful of accounts have these features presently,” but it will expand on a gradual business to more accounts.

Those who are receiving invitation to take part out of the gate are getting an e-mail that goes something like this

“Congrats!

Hitwise is reporting that all is once again normal with the world of search as Google garnered 71% of the total searches performed in the US in April. This is a 2 percent increase from March numbers. While bing had been showing some gains recently and giving some people hope that they would be a possible contender to Google at some point the search wannabe saw a 2 percent slip. Looking at the chart below from Hitwise it appears that if Ask.com is quickly fading into the sunset.

Other measurements of interest show literally no change in the use of longer search phrases. Bing / Microsoft search did see increase in several verticals but with their overall percentage of searches these ‘gains’ may be just as much the result of Yahoo’s decreasing presence as a search engine as it is bing’s real impact to date.

Maybe Google really has found the way to challenge Apple’s iPhone supremacy—and it isn’t the Nexus One. Or at least not the Nexus One alone. While it seems like Google’s been searching high and low for an iPhone killer since the G1 came out in October 2008 (or since rumors started in December 2006), they’ve hit on the real way to take over the smart phone market: by the OS.

Google’s Android OS outsold the iPhone in Q1 on 2010, according to consumer surveys conducted by NPD. With dozens of devices offering various features—and more than one potential carrier—Android is a more versatile option.

Last month, privacy and data protection officials from Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom wrote an open letter to Google voicing their concerns about Google Buzz. Of course, this is nothing new, since Buzz has prompted privacy concerns since the day it rolled out.

Now Google is responding: and they’ve decided that what those ten countries really wanted was a briefing on Google’s privacy policy and guiding principles. Yeah, that’s what they were looking for.

Let’s rehash this conversation here. First, the ten countries say:

Were you one of the ones that hated the taste of New Coke?

Did you threaten to start drinking Pepsi, unless Coca-Cola switched back to the original recipe?

Well, if you feel the same way about your search results, there’s hope! Nope, you don’t need to threaten to switch to Bing, it’s far easier.

All you need do is click this link. It will add “webhp?hl=all” to your Google URL and switch you to the old version. It appears to be a permanent switch to–Google drops a cookie to keep you on that UI.

If you need to change back, then this link appears to do the trick.

Now you can enjoy Google Classic.