Marketing Pilgrim

This weekend, the eyes and ears of the world are focused on San Diego as a crowd of over 120,000 descend on the city for Comic-Con! What started out in the 70’s as a small gathering of scifi and comic fans has grown into the media event of the year. And despite the name, it’s not all about comics. Actually, it’s tough to even find a booth devoted to comics in the deluge of TV, movie, video game and toy brands that flood the convention floor. That’s because the convention has become the place to get the buzz going about nearly any media project and that’s marketing money well spent.

So in honor of this yearly media-madhouse, I give you 5 Marketing Lessons You Can Learn from Comic-Con

5. Think Small

A few days ago Google launched a new “image search” user interface to the public. If you haven’t tried it yet you should go ahead and give it whirl–after reading this post. My first impression was wow! I really like how the images are positioned in a way that maximizes all available screen real estate.

As I continued to search for images and test out the new UI, I had this feeling of deja vu. Something didn’t seem right with this search feature. For some reason it felt like I had used this before. And, then it dawned on me! Certain aspects of Google’s new image search resemble Bing’s image search. The most notable similarity is the absence of pagination navigation at the bottom. This feature change alone on a search engine can stick out like a sore thumb and create a remarkable difference in other similar image search engines like Yahoo for example.

People who have way too much time on their hands, have done a study to chart the mood swings of the average Twitter user over the course of a week.

Stick with me, it gets good-ish.

The people running this test come from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance, Harvard University. They used over 300 million tweets that were posted between Sep 2006 – Aug 2009 and they charted them based on geographic location and mood of the tweet. The moods were determined through the use of the ANEW scale from the University of Florida which rates a large number of English words in terms of the emotions they convey. (Still with me?)

If you’ve been involved with SEO or online marketing for any length of time, chances are you’ve escaped the confines of your office and ventured out into the real world to meet like minded marketers. Perhaps you’re a conference regular attending events like Pubcon, SES, or SMX. If you’re like me and tens of thousands of other online marketers, you’ve also checked out your local meetup scene.

Meetups are gatherings of people who all share a common profession or interest. There are meetups covering almost every aspect of online marketing including SEO, SEM, Affiliate Marketing, Publishing, and Programming.

Most online marketing meetups are organized by local marketing organizations or specific individuals or companies looking to increase exposure for their own services. While motives may vary, most meetup organizers provide a valuable service for their local marketing community by offering insightful presentations, information sharing, and networking.

Remember when Google won the bid to migrate the City of Los Angeles over to Gmail and other Google Apps?

Yeah, it’s not going so well.

In fact, the migration is going sooooo slowly that Google is having to compensate L.A. around $135,000 for the delay. So, what’s the hold-up?

Well, apart from the fact that this is a local government organization–the poster-child of inefficiency–it appears the LAPD is the bottleneck:

…while over 10,000 city employees have now been switched over to Google, she hopes to have up to 6,000 more moved in mid-August. After that, Levin said, the city will focus on “a more detailed schedule” for getting the roughly 13,000 members of the police department switched over.

Apparently the police department is concerned about the security of Google Apps.

Google has a real buddy in the airline industry with Virgin America. During last year’s holiday travel season Google offered free WiFi on all Virgin America flights. Now, Google and Virgin have expanded the in-flight maps offered to travelers as they can now get topographic information about where they are and more.

Google’s LatLong blog tells more

….as a part of our continued partnership with Virgin America, we’ve completely updated the Google Maps data on the touchscreens of every airplane seat. As before, the map shows you almost exactly where you are, and you can zoom and pan to explore. Now, with our beautiful terrain view and fresh Google data, the maps are not only prettier, but also highlight mountains, elevation and other natural features. In other words, it more closely matches what you’d actually see if you had cloud-penetrating eyesight and looked out the window from 35,000 feet.