Marketing Pilgrim

I am the first to admit that the whole ‘mommy blogger’ phenomenon has been beaten within an inch of its online life but that doesn’t make it less important. Take it a step further and really look at those who are actually reading these mommy blogger posts and you are touching on marketing gold.

Moms are the ultimate influencers on most purchases in the home as a result there can never be enough information about what clicks with them when they are looking for a blog that resonates with their particular brand of ‘mommying’.

eMarketer and Unicast help the marketing community to hopefully understand this powerful group’s online needs a little better

While this may not be a marketing story in the strictest sense, it is very much so because marketing has always been about data. Data collection followed by analysis followed by strategies based on that data then eventually marketing campaigns to do what we all are trying to do: sell something.

As a result we have more data that can be accessed by more people than ever before which means there is a better chance than ever before in history for data to fall into the wrong hands.

Maybe Eric Schmidt made such a fuss about nothing being private anymore because he was aware that even on the Internet’s hallowed ground of the Googleplex that data would fall into the wrong hands.

Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt started a buzz or maybe a wave when he let it “slip” today that Google will be adding a  ‘social layer’ this fall.

Oh, there’s so much to discuss in that statement. First of all, ‘social layer?’ Some reporters are taking this to mean that Google will be adding social elements to all of their current sites as opposed to developing a new site specifically aimed at competing with Facebook. This being the case, it’s likely they’ll create a home page for people that allows them to link to and follow all of the related info from their friends.

Remember, Google already tried a similar trick with Google Buzz which was a horrendous failure. But Buzz was like Twitter meets Digg and not a true social networking site where you can spend virtual time with your friends.

I use Twitter everyday, but I rarely do it from the actual Twitter page on the web. I use HootSuite and other applications to get the most from the service, but that is about to change.

Today, Twitter announced that they’re getting a make-over and it’s a doozy. It’s a big step toward making Twitter more than just an information handler. It’s a step toward making it a Facebook-ish time sucker and that’s good for all of us.

The new Twitter page will now work as two separate columns. The left side will be the feed you’re used to, but the right side will be a pop-out that expands on the tweet you’ve clicked on. This change was needed for one big reason — the fact that you’ll be able to watch videos and see photos without leaving the site.

A recent Nielsen study shows that regardless of the platform (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile) the apps that are most commonly used show what people on the go are interested in. It’s friends (Facebook), weather (The Weather Channel), music (Pandora) and what’s local (Google Maps). Here’s the picture story.

What is interesting is that Twitter only made the Top 5 for the BlackBerry OS. Speaking as a recent BlackBerry user that moved over to the world of Android, the Twitter BlackBerry experience was one of the few that I found to really translate on a BB device so it kind of makes sense (to me at least).

It seems like the latest “xxxx is dead” bandwagon is RSS–and some A-listers are jumping on it with gusto!

We’ll overlook the fact that many of these people also thought FriendFeed was going to be the holy grail of social networking aggregation, and instead take a look at this chart:

That’s Google Reader’s growth over the past five years.

Does that look to you like the death of RSS? Nope, me neither. In fact, I thought it quite ironic that the people claiming the death of RSS pushed that news out to their RSS feeds, which then ended up in my Google Reader dashboard.