Marketing Pilgrim

Claire Atkinson of the New York Post says Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong are thinking about going into business together. While it’s pretty clear what Facebook brings to the table, what could AOL possibly have to offer that would be worth a swap? Once the only game in town when it came to social media on the web, AOL is now an aging brand name that means nothing to users under forty.

Says Atkinson, it’s AOL’s online ad marketing mojo that is of interest to Facebook, and it’s enough for the popular kid on the playground to consider hanging out with the nerd.

“Think of Tim Armstrong’s former role running ad sales for Google and think of where Facebook needs help.”

Mobile is growing. We can all agree on that. Whether it’s the actual ‘year of mobile’ doesn’t matter one bit because there will never be such a thing. Why? Because the mobile world and how marketers approach it will be a process that will happen over many years no matter how the industry writes about it.

One of the areas where mobile is getting more traction than most is in the retail sector. It only makes sense since many people use their mobile devices while they are shopping to get more information or look for bargains. As a result, retailers are concentrating on getting a true ‘first mover advantage’ over the competition in this increasingly important space.

By Jim Kukral

Google hates you, and they love you (your money mostly).

This is the very first thing I try to communicate to new students who want to understand their future relationship with Google. And make no doubt about it, as an Internet Marketing professional, you WILL have a relationship with them, if you want any chance of being successful that is.

Google is a business. They make billions of dollars from advertisements. I have read that up to 75% of their income each year is from those same ads, probably more. When you buy Google Adwords, and you pay $1.00 (for example) to bid for the top position on your favorite most search for keyphrase, Google takes a tiny piece of that $1.00. Imagine that happening 10 million times a day or more.

Yesterday, Twitter announced a new service called Fast Follow that allows anyone to receive tweets on their mobile phone without benefit of a Twitter account. You set up the service by sending ‘on [username]’ to 40404 in the US. You turn off the tweets by substituting off for on in your text to the same number.

Fast Follow is kind of a gateway drug to full-blown Twitter usage. The idea being that once you see how fun and helpful tweets can be, you’ll want to have them on your phone all the time.

Not to be outdone by Facebook’s ‘Like’ button it looks like Twitter is joining the ‘click here for more exposure’ crowd with its very own Tweet button. This kind of sharing had been the domain of Tweetmeme until this point so we will need to keep an eye on their fate as this new feature appears.

Mashable reports

Twitter is launching an official Tweet Button for sharing articles on websites and counting how many times a URL has been shared, according to documents Mashable has obtained. The Tweet Button could launch as soon as this Thursday.

We’re still diving into the details, but from what we can tell, the Tweet Button is designed to be the most comprehensive counter of retweets and shares across Twitter’s network. It is a single line of code that can be added to any website. There are three versions of the button (110×20, 55×20, 55×63) with five different settings for customization.

How far should Google go when it comes to profiting from the massive amounts of personal data they posses? That’s the question that is discussed in a confidential (not anymore) “vision statement” that was put together in 2008 by Aitan Weinberg, who is now a senior product manager.

The Wall Street Journal got their hands on the document and they say that it is a blueprint for turning Google into the biggest clearninghouse for what most would consider to be private data.

“Google is pushing into uncharted privacy territory for the company. Until recently, it refrained from aggressively cashing in on its own data about Internet users, fearing a backlash. But the rapid emergence of scrappy rivals who track people’s online activities and sell that data, along with Facebook Inc.’s growth, is forcing a shift.”