Marketing Pilgrim

Google’s already made big waves in the international arena this year by deciding to pull out of China after too many censorship demands and a cyber attack targeting human rights activitists’ email accounts. Although they’re now redirecting google.cn to google.co.hk, Google says that the situation “seems to be stable” now.

CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the annual shareholder meeting this week. MarketWatch reports that Schmidt said their engineers and sales forces remain in place in China. However, Schmidt recognized that the status quo could always change: “should the Chinese government become upset with us,” they could always block access to the Hong Kong version of the site.

BusinessWeek reports that Google will continue to sell ads within China. However, overall, the move has hurt Google in China, it seems:

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Anything, absolutely anything, you publish to a private social network can leak out to the public.

Most of the time, that insult about your boss, or that confession that you’re playing hooky on a Friday, remains private until one of your friends decides to repost it publicly.

Other times, people just assume that only their friends will ever see such confessions. Well, if that sounds like you, here’s your wake-up call.

What you see above is a simple search engine thrown together by two guys to demonstrate just how public your Facebook status updates are. Fortunately, the examples listed at the top of the search page are somewhat benign. But, you can see how easy it would be for your boss to see if you’re sharing company secrets. Your spouse to see that you’re cheating on them. Your…[fill in the blank].

In an attempt to possibly calm people’s nerves about the state of the online advertising industry, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers highlighted the year over gains in Internet advertising rather than the decline between Q4 ’09 and and Q1 ’10. Of course, that decline is the new ‘normal’ considering the heavy concentration on advertising during the holiday buying season. It hasn’t always been that way though.

The chart below tells the story of an industry that is certainly hitting a plateau of sorts as it charts Internet advertising revenues by quarter since 2001. Q4 to Q1 drops were not the norm until they started in Q1 2008.

Now the party must really be going full steam. If there is something to complain and whine about in the world at all the EU is usually the lead dog. Although they are merely just dog piling on Facebook at this point it now feels like there is no one left to put up a fuss about Facebook, privacy and even the people behind the ‘Book.

The Telegraph tells us

The Data Protection Working Party, which advises the Commission on data and privacy issues, wrote a letter to Facebook, saying recent changes that made previously private information publicly viewable by default were “unacceptable”.

In the letter, the group said that profile information, and data about the connections between users, should have a default setting in which this information was only shared with “self-selected” contacts.

Patricio Robles of eConsultancy takes a look at the success of some recent social media campaigns—and the results aren’t exactly as inspiring as they might seem at first glance. For example, he looks at a recent JetBlue campaign on Facebook, where they saw a “massive” response (in ClickZ’s words).

But the biggest challenge facing that campaign wasn’t getting people to fork out the bucks for discount plane tickets—it was getting them to believe the $10 fares were for real.

Um, if all it’s going to cost is one click and a minute or two to figure out if you can really get a plane ticket for $10, is that exactly a high barrier to clicking? And then, once the $10 last-minute fares were real (in honor of JetBlue’s 10th anniversary), sheesh, why not buy a few?

If you’ve ever tried to keep a YouTube video private for just you and your friends, you’ve probably run into some problems actually making the video accessible to those friends. (Or is it just me?) But YouTube is adding a new new feature to share a video with as many people as possible, while still keeping it private from the general viewing public on the most popular video site in the world: unlisted videos.

The new feature will keep unlisted videos from the general search results, but still allow anyone with a direct link to watch the video. (So it will still be completely possible for video sharing to get more than a little out of hand if people continue to pass a link along.)

Says YouTube: