Marketing Pilgrim

As most of you have noticed lately Twitter has had its share of downtime. Talk of the Twitter fail whale used to be more prevalent but until recently was seen as more of a nuisance rather than an issue. Well, for many users the amount of downtime experienced recently is moving quickly into the realm of real concern rather than just an inconvenience.

Twitter is obviously aware as noted on their blog which attempts to explain what’s been happening.

From a site stability and service outage perspective, it’s been Twitter’s worst month since last October.

What’s the problem?

Don’t you just love getting the inside scoop on a big acquisition?

I do!

So, after reading that IBM had agreed to acquire web analytics fim Coremetrics for an undisclosed sum, I was happy to find former IBMer Mike Moran share some information you may not know. Like the fact that IBM originally sold its web analytics unit to Coremetrics!

IBM doesn’t make too many mistakes, but I thought it made a big one four years ago when it sold off its SurfAid Web analytics business to Coremetrics. Today, IBM reversed course in a very smart move when it swallowed up Coremetrics to tap into its customers’ growing need for Web analytics.

While I’ve followed the story about Mark Zuckerberg dissing the iPhone, it wasn’t really of much interest to me–or to you.

Until today.

For those of you unaware, the Facebook CEO posted the following to his Facebook page:

For a CEO with a high profile such as Zuckerberg, that probably wasn’t the smartest of things to do. After all, journalists didn’t just write about Mark Zuckerberg making the claim, no, they wrote about the Facebook CEO dissing Apple.

Now, what’s the Radically Transparent way to nip this in the bud? Make an apology on Facebook? Stage a coffee shop group hug with Steve Jobs? Be seen showing off your iPhone to your friends in a trendy LA nightclub? Hmm, all not bad.

Everyone in the advertising and marketing world would love to see everything get back to the halcyon days of ad spending like there was no tomorrow which seemed to exist prior to our current economic climate. Well, it’s OK to dream but if that dream interferes with the reality of a situation then you have trouble. A recent report on ad spending into the future produced by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and reported by the New York Times Media Decoder blog gives some insight into what may be the real situation.

Advertising spending in the United States will not begin to grow again until next year, according to an annual forecast from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The 11th annual entertainment and media outlook report, to be released on Tuesday morning, predicts that ad spending will fall 0.5 percent this year compared with last year.

Twitter is officially in the geo-location game. Yesterday it announced the roll out of its Twitter tweet tagging service which will give the location of where you are tweeting from to those interested in knowing those things about you. The Twitter blog describes it in the context of the World Cup horn blowing soccer matches.

If you’re like everyone at the Twitter office, you’re going crazy about the World Cup. When turning to Twitter to keep up with the current game, it helps to know where a Tweet is coming from—is that person watching the game on TV or is he actually in the stadium? To help answer that question, we’re excited to announce Twitter Places on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. Starting today, you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location. Try it out during the next match—you will be able to see Tweets coming from the stadium.