Marketing Pilgrim

According to the 2010 Display Advertising Study conducted by Advertiser Perceptions (for Collective Media), advertisers love to target audiences—and know what they’re getting—with site-specific ad buys. But buying targeted ad space on a site-by-site basis is time consuming—and buying on ad networks may see some increase, especially with advertisers with larger budgets.

Most advertisers still prefer site-specific ad buys and plan to continue that tactic. 74% list targeting as the primary benefit. On the other hand, ad networks’ primary benefit is reach—but only 8% (up from 3% last year) of advertisers said that reach is what differentiate ad networks. The most popular answer there was again targeting.

Watch out Gowalla!

Run for the hills Foursquare!

In your face…er, Facebook!

Location based status updates are the hottest thing in social networking and Google would like in on the action. Oh, and if it decides to enter the race, it already has a head-start with 3 million willing users.

3 million? Already? How’d that happen?

Well, Google Latitude has offered location awareness since before your best friend became the Mayor of the men’s restroom on the 4th floor–it was a nasty incident with a beef burrito, I’m sure he’ll explain more on Twitter.

Anyway, Google has hinted that it might just get in on this check-in nonsense by turning Google Latitude into a Foursquare competitor:

Last month speculation swirled about the upcoming location services that Facebook was working on getting to market. With the interest in Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown gaining more and more momentum there isn’t a better time for Facebook to come in and put their giant footprint on this developing landscape.

AdAge reports that McDonald’s is already working with the social networking behemoth around this service and will be front and center when Facebook delivers the anticipated functionality.

Facebook is preparing to launch location-based status updates for its users. But the social network is also planning to offer it to marketers, including McDonald’s.

Google has rolled out an expanded Google Goggles translation tool for Android devices using the image recognition technology of the service. The tool was originally introduced at the Mobile World Congress in February of this year in Barcelona. At the time only German could be recognized but with this roll out yesterday the service can now recognize English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and translate into many other languages. Google is currently working on expanding to more Latin-based languages and eventually aiming at other major languages like Chinese. It’s as simple as point, shoot and translate.

Google’s Mobile Blog tells us how it works and provides some pretty pictures as well.

Here’s how it works:

No, seriously. Consumer Reports’ Electronics Blog reports this week that Facebook users don’t seem to care that much about privacy. According to their National Research Center, 23% of Facebook users “either didn’t know that site offered privacy controls or chose not to use them.” 52% of social network users have risky information posted online.

I’m not sure what constitutes “risky information” according to Consumer Reports, but they do have some recommendations for Facebook privacy in next month’s magazine—which clearly aren’t written for people who work on the Internet. Or might have friends who aren’t already connected to mutual friends on Facebook—because following Consumer Reports’ recommendations will make it so only friends of your friends can find you on Facebook. So if you want to reconnect with that friend from college/HS/before, you’d better hope you already have a connection, or they aren’t quite as paranoid as you.

What are you doing with Twitter? What do you think you could be doing five months from now? In five months, says ClickZ, office-supply retailer Staples “has turned its Twitter account into a marketing insights and sales engine. Perhaps more importantly, the office supplies retailer has quickly learned the social site’s benefits for customer relations.” While they’re not yet at the level of Dell or Zappos, Staples has shown a good example of a startup Twitter account and its power.

One big success for the retailer came last November—when they failed. A Black Friday coupon code for the retailer malfunctioned, resulting in a lot of unhappy Tweets. Staples was able to use Twitter to help disgruntled customers. Staples is also using the microblogging service to keep a finger on the pulse of customer sentiment.