Marketing Pilgrim

Get ready to see a lot more if this kind of thing as this economy continues to tank. Once completely free tools (even those with limited paid offerings) will be offering very basic versions for free and then ease users with more desire for functionality into a paid model. Heck, trackur does it. Why? Because it makes sense and free only goes so far. It’s that simple.

The latest to join this model is the popular content sharing tool SlideShare. TechCrunch reports

SlideShare, the “YouTube for presentations,” has been focusing its efforts on becoming the premier platform for professional and business content. Today, SlideShare is going freemium with the announcement of tiered, paid plans for businesses.

Being unpopular was never any fun, but these days we have social media sites to rub it in. Are spammers the only people following you on Twitter? Is Tom is your only MySpace friend? Is your mom the only person giving you the thumbs up on Facebook. Well, fret no more because now, thanks to uSocial.net, you can buy all the friends you need for the low, low price of $197.

Sounds like a Saturday Night Live parody commercial, but it’s all true. uSocial.net is a marketing company that sells blocks of Facebook fans. They charge $197 for 1,000 fans and they guarantee that they’ll be targeted fans who will never desert you. Pretty sweet deal for those who can’t get a date on their own, don’t you think? Apparently, quite a few people think so and they aren’t just companies looking to boost numbers.

Facebook is the market maker for social media ad spend. Maybe that’s why there is so much rumbling from Google about getting into the social media game for real because, after all, online advertising is Google’s game, right?

eMarketer reports that they have increased their projections for social media ad spend for 2010 an it is mainly Facebook’s success that is causing this reassessment.

eMarketer estimates US advertisers will spend $1.68 billion on social networking sites this year, a more than 20% increase over 2009. Spending will rise even further by 2011 to more than $2 billion.

In December 2009, eMarketer forecast $1.3 billion in social network ad spending for 2010. Strong performance from online ad spending in general, and Facebook in particular, has resulted in the increased forecast.

Thursday, I posted a guest post all about personal branding. I talked about how you can leverage a personal brand to build links. I truly believe that personal branding has tremendous opportunity for business development. But then yesterday, I saw the above tweet. My friend Stephanie reminded me that not everyone wants to “be famous”.

And that’s just fine.

The biggest failure of social media in our society is the myth that everyone should be famous. As a result, the networks and platforms are overrun with over zealous fame seekers that just end up contributing to the noise rather than making music. Making music is an art form, yelling at the top of your lungs isn’t.

Those in social media that have the strongest personal brands, do so because they have the following characteristics.

When it comes to word of mouth marketing, GasPedal says there are three talkers you may have overlooked. One of them you see everyday when you head in to work. It’s your receptionist, your mail-room guy, even your secretary and it doesn’t matter if they work for the marketing department, they are the perfect brand advocates.

Employees are often the last people we think of when it comes to marketing but who else has a bigger stake in wanting to see a company do well? Take your receptionist. She probably has 500 Facebook friends and her own fan-following on her blog. Why not offer her some free samples to spread around? Make her an affiliate so she can earn a kick-back on sales or give her her own discount code to share with friends and family.

Everyone loves a deal, even the luxury foodies that roam New York City looking for most exquisite truffled egg toast or perfectly prepared poison-free fugu. That’s why Zagat has team up with DealOn for Zagat Exclusives, the newest group-buying program to hit the web.

The new site will offer deals related only to the restaurants listed in the Zagat Guide. The program will begin this September in New York City, then the company is expected to roll out additional sites for other major cities across the US including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. Each offer will start with a fixed price then the price will drop with each person who buys the deal. This way there is no minimum number of people required to make the deal happen, but the more people, the merrier the price gets.