Marketing Pilgrim

Google continues to expand its efforts to get away from being a revenue one-trick pony. A recent result of these efforts is the announced partnership with Omnicom who will be using Google’s ad exchange to purchase display ads for their clients.

With Apple having some reception issues (nothing a roll of duct tape can’t fix though) and suffering the slings and arrows of a bored press that is looking to make someone a target and then deem it news, Google is doing pretty well. Motorola’s Droid X rolls out today and Verizon reports that it is gaining in market share even without the iPhone in its stable of smartphone offerings. As the Wall Street Journal reports this new Omnicom deal is more reason to celebrate.

In an effort to turn Twitter’s captive audience into dollars, Twitter has launched @earlybird, a new account that give followers exclusive deals from a variety of sponsors. Up first is Disney Pictures and a Buy 1 Get 1 Free deal on tickets to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

The account has only been live for a week and this is the first deal to be sent through, but already they’ve picked up nearly 50,000 followers. The irony is, these same 50,000 people were probably the ones complaining about Twitter’s decision to add sponsored tweets to their feeds earlier this year. Now they’re paying (granted, not in cash) for the privilege of having ads sent their way.

But just because a 50,000 tweeters clicked the follow button, doesn’t mean that @earlybird will be a success. That will depend on two factors:

We all want things to get better for business in general. Even with Internet marketing not suffering the same decimation that most advertising sectors did during our recent and ongoing economic slide, there was significant impact. If nothing else the economy cooled the fast growing industry and made it look more, gulp, real.

There may be reason to celebrate though. A recent study from SearchIgnite tells us that paid search spending has seen nice growth in Q2 when looking at year over year results. Here is a picture of it for you.

We always like to warn our readers that you must consider the source of research in this age of “Research as PR”. I have no reason to challenge the integrity of these findings but with SearchIgnite being a search marketing company it stands to reason that caution should be exercised regarding what is being demonstrated.

By Renée Revetta

Facebook recently enabled a feature that instantly suggests a dynamically created Facebook ad based on a provided URL. I tested it out to uncover how Facebook set up this feature. As with most things, there are some pros and cons to the dynamic ad creation approach.

Facebook creates the ad by searching the HTML of the provided URL for certain tags. Specifically, it pulls the title tag, meta description, and an image associated with the main content, similar to how it pulls information when Facebook users share a link.

Twitter dashboard HootSuite added a new layer of functionality this week that emphasizes the influencers in your social media crowd and further lays the ground work toward becoming a pay service.

Like high school, social media users fall into cliques and everyone wants to hang with the popular kids because they’re the ones that have the most influence on those around them. HootSuite has made it easier to locate and pitch to those popular peeps with their new Klout Score filter.

Located on the home feed tab, the filter allows you to sort your incoming Twitter tweets by scope of influence as determined by HootSuite’s super secret algorithm, aka Klout. You can then use a slider to eliminate people under a particular Klout score, isolating only those people you really want to associate yourself with. In my case, I don’t have anyone higher than a 69 in Klout value with Andy Beal coming in just below a contact who calls herself a “bacon queen.” I’m just saying.

Amidst the very arid and nearly barren news landscape for the Internet marketing industry (unless you consider pure speculation and duct taping your iPhone news) is Google’s announcement of a new website. It seems very innocuous but when you think about what Google is facing these days maybe there is more to this.

The site, Google Fiber for Communities, is not about better digestive tract health but rather it’s about higher quality, less expensive Internet access for all brought to by, you guessed it, Google. The Official Google Blog reports

In February we announced our plans to build experimental, ultra-high speed broadband networks. Over the past several months, our team’s been hard at work reviewing the nearly 1,100 community responses to our request for information—not to mention the nearly 200,000 responses from individuals across the U.S.