Marketing Pilgrim

LinkedIn is sneaky. You would think that a site that just announced it reached the 70 million user mark would be hard to keep off the radar but sometimes it feels that way. Just check out how many social media ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ admit that they need to work on their Linkedin presence more. In terms of being cool it comes in a distant third to Facebook and Twitter for sure.

However it is perceived, one of the aspects of LinkedIn that gets plenty of play is the Group feature. This allows for users to create affinity groups and have discussions around topics that are targeted and available to those who want to join. With over 650,000 of these groups formed LinkedIn has upgraded its offering. Check out this video for a good description of the changes.

How was your Monday?

Mine? Mine was pretty awful and I’m glad it’s over. Still, today is a new day and, so far, it doesn’t suck!

Let’s get your day started off on the right foot with these Picks:

• Quora’s Highly Praised Q&A Service Launches To The Public (And The Real Test Begins)
• E-mail composition now the star of iPad’s Gmail show
• Salesforce Chatter Now Available to the Public
• At Google, You’re Old and Gray At 40
• Who’s Watching What?
• Google Adds OCR for PDF Files and Images

If you are a big player in the Internet space these days you will be brought into the spotlight for anything around privacy. You can be confident of that. With Apple getting plenty of attention with a new iPhone OS release (iOS 4) and the latest generation iPhone 4 about to hit the hands of those pre-order folks (keep your fingers crossed!) there is also talk about the new privacy policy that comes wit these changes.

All Things Digital reports

Apple is rolling out its new iPhone operating system, which means that it is also rolling out its new iAd platform. Which means that Apple now has to make its users the same offer that other big digital ad players offer: You can opt-out of our ad targeting program, if you’re willing to do a little work.

Did you know there’s a ruling before the appeals court that, if not overturned, might prevent you from using Twitter to share some hot news topic you just heard about?

It might also prevent Google News from indexing a blog post until given the go ahead by the original source of the news?

Crazy? Yes, but you can thank the antiquated laws of this country. You can also thank Google and Twitter for going to bat on our behalf. And on behalf of Theflyonthewall.com.

Google Inc and Twitter Inc have asked an appeals court to overturn a lower court’s decision to bar Theflyonthewall.com from issuing immediate news on analyst research from several Wall Street banks…In March, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote said Theflyonthewall.com engaged in “systematic misappropriation,” essentially getting a “free ride” from its quick publication of upgrades and downgrades that can move stocks higher and lower.

So, Yahoo and Bing, how’s that “taking on Google” thing working out for y’all?

Oh, never mind.

What’s missing from this list of words?

Updates
Response
Statement
Briefing
Broadcast
Distribution
Push

Those are just some of the words that I found while looking around BP’s social media efforts for the Gulf oil spill. So, what’s missing?

How about…

Listening
Engaging
Discussing
Conversation
Dialog
Understanding

You’ll be hard pressed to find any of those words. There’s little coming from BP’s “response” page, Facebook page, Twitter account or YouTube profile that suggests that BP is interested in any type of conversation with those affected by the oil spill.

Not that you can fully blame BP. It’s an archaic company, not used to holding conversations with the “small people” –also known as its customers. And it’s PR advice is coming from another traditional agency–which may not have the “conversation” experience, or may simply be constrained by BP’s instructions on actually talking to people.