Marketing Pilgrim

ShopLocal has made the news twice this week with two major players taking on their virtual circular technology. Facebook and MSN have both begun incorporating ShopLocal apps into their systems in order to bring localized deals to the consumer.

On Facebook, ShopLocal is integrating local sales circulars into corporate fan pages. When a user visits a brand site on Facebook, the application looks at their profile to determine their geographic area then presents the proper circular for their city. Vikram Sharma, CEO of ShopLocal says;

“We know that 49 percent of visitors to corporate fan pages go there to gain information on sales and special offers and another 45 percent come to learn about products. ShopLocal’s toolkit helps retailers across the country capitalize on this social shopping phenomenon.”

Google’s Place Pages are becoming increasingly critical to the ability for local businesses to capitalize on their online presence. With mobile increasing in popularity (is it the year of mobile this year or is that next?) and more people who actually do searches understanding maps (meaning that while we, the industry, prattle on about these options they are only as good as the searchers’ understanding of them) this element of local search will only increase in importance.

Google knows this and has finally responded to one sore spot in the whole place page experience for business owners: being able to respond to reviews. The Google LatLong blog tells us

It promised so much…

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

But, in the end, it just plain sucked…

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

Some may say, “Google Wave was just ahead of its time,” but that’s just sucking up to Google. Google Wave was one of those ideas where the company starts with “hey, this is cool, this will change everything” instead of “hey, what problem can we solve for people?”

It may seem like the Twitter-verse if full of companies hawking their wares, but a new survey by 360i says it isn’t so. They recently published a report called Twitter & the Consumer-Marketer Dynamic and frankly, I’m finding a large part of it hard to believe.

The report, which you can read in full here, has three key conclusions.

1. Twitter is primarily for people, not corporations.

– More than 90% of tweets come from consumers
– Only 12% of consumer tweets mention a brand
– When someone mentions a brand name on Twitter, they’re most likely talking about a Social Network (22% of mentions), or an Entertainment (17%) or Technology brand (17%). The top brands mentioned on Twitter are Twitter itself, Apple products/brands and Google

OK, so in case you need a refresher on how Pilgrim’s Picks works, here you go:

We only have so many writers–3 actually–and only so much time to write–we have real jobs too–and there are sometimes dozens of interesting stories floating around the web.

Capiche?

So, Pilgrim’s Picks is kind of like the Self Serve Checkout lines you see at the grocery store. Grab the items you like and check them out!

• LinkedIn acquires buying recommendation company mSpoke
• Tim Mayer has left Yahoo. Good luck Tim!
• Hulu lost viewers in June, but is still leading the pack when it comes to video ads
• 5 Common A/B & Multivariate Testing Mistakes
• Ouch: AOL misses low earnings expectations
• Facebook Is Testing Ratings and Reviews in Ads

Look, if you’re going to do a survey about Twitter habits (via), you really should get a sample larger than 135 people.

I admit, that in most cases, 135 people is enough to make a study statistically relevant, but we’re talking about Twitter here. Twitter has about, what, 100 million registered users? OK, let’s be conservative and say 50 million registered. More conservative still? Let’s say 10 million active users.

135 out of 10 million? Is that going to be a survey you’d fully trust?

It is? Alright then! I have some pretty charts for you!

Apparently 29% of Twitter users have retweeted something without actually looking at the contents of a link: