Marketing Pilgrim

Ever get a negative review for your business and just wished you could give them a piece of your mind?

Well, the next time you even remotely consider attacking your attacker–especially on a “neutral” site such as Yelp–remember this tirade from an Arizona restaurant owner.

First of all. Wow!

Look, even if you want to go on a tirade, you shouldn’t. If your restaurant is so great, and this reviewer is indeed a fake, then your raving fans will come to your defense. Making an attack like this just adds fuel to the flames. Ever heard of the expression: Methinks the lady doth protest too much?

So what was the reaction to this tirade? Other patrons joined in with their 1-star review. Whether they’re legitimate customers–or friends of the first 1-star reviewer–is besides the point. Blasting your customers gives them a green light to “have at it.”

I’m getting fed-up with the word games that Google plays with the media.

On August 5th, we asked if Google and Verizon had made a secret pact to ensure Google’s traffic received priority over Verizon’s network. Google scolded the media–the NYTs mostly–tweeting:

NYTimes is wrong. We’ve not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet.

Except, Google was playing its usual game of “don’t listen to what we say, listen to what we don’t say.” As it turns out, Google and Verizon had been in talks with each other and the door is open for them to come to some arrangement over the carriage of Google’s traffic. It just doesn’t apply to wired networks. Wireless networks are fair game!

The very first maps on record are Babylonian clay tablets that were made around 2300 B.C.. Do you think the men who chiseled those graphics into stone had any idea that we’d be looking at those maps using an electronic tablet that scoops information out of the air?

The world is changing faster than ever, and no where is that more obvious than in the social media world. Sites that didn’t even exist five years ago are now world powers and it makes for a fascinating visual.

Ethan Bloch of Flowtown recently posted his 2010 Social Networking Map which was inspired by the 2007 Online Community map by XKCD.

One of the reasons that Twitter is readying its sales team could be the fact that they are also preparing to offer the Promoted Tweets and Trends option to third party apps as well. This is not something that is going to be widespread in the very near future but expect it to happen sooner than later since all the signs seem to be pointing in that direction.

Mashable reports

Twitter is preparing itself and its developers for the rollout of its ad platforms, Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends, within third-party applications, starting with desktop apps.

The company has made an update to its application programming interface (API) that gives developers access to two new fields related to Promoted Tweets and Trends. These data points aren’t ready for primetime though; it will be some time until you actually see Promoted Tweets in TweetDeck, Seesmic or other third-party apps.

What is the sure fire sign that a company is moving into a more ‘business-like’ phase of its development? Usually the hiring of sales talent is the best indication. So the rest of the marketing world should be preparing themselves for a ‘new’ Twitter very soon as the social media powerhouse has hired some sales players.

AdAge reports

Want to buy an ad on Twitter? Now there’s someone to call.

The micro-blog service, which still classifies itself as “pre-revenue,” has an enormous user base and a few fledging ad units — with more on the way. And now it has started building out a sales team starting with two hires: Facebook veteran Dan Coughlin and Yelp’s first salesperson, Amanda Levy.

A great bot army has descended on the Internet.

Tirelessly performing the bidding of its masters, this ravenous horde is invading our websites, taking our content, clicking on our ads and becoming our friends. Most of the time we don’t even know they are there, but they are and at one point or another you need to come to terms with bots.

A bot is an automated software application which typically performs tasks over the Internet. There is virtually an unlimited number of bots performing a dizzying array of tasks. In the world of online marketing, we see bots used to crawl websites, scrape content, check search rankings, automate social media and much more.