Marketing Pilgrim

The press and technology have one of those classic “love-hate” relationships. On the one hand technology makes for good articles because of the high level of interest expressed by certain groups in society. On the other hand, technology is the one major thing that is forcing a sea change in the delivery of the news industry and changing the face of the journalistic work force.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism recently completed a study looking at traditional media’s treatment of technology.

The mainstream news media have offered the American public a divided view of how information technology influences society, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

May I suggest that Google CEO Eric Schmidt cancel any plans to ski the French alps this year–the authorities may not let him in!

Not after he (and Google proper) were convicted of defamation for results showing up in Google Suggest:

The new function, which suggests options as you type in a word, brought up the words “rapist” and “satanist” when the plaintiff’s name was typed into the search engine, legalis.net reported.

The court ordered Google to make a symbolic payment of one euro in damages and take measures to ensure they could be no repeat of the offence.

Whether the plaintiff deserves the reputation cast down by Google Suggest, we won’t discuss here, however this could be the kind of precedent needed for someone to test this in a US court.

Twitter is moving from the social media collector of huge numbers of accounts and unique site visits etc to the thing everyone in the business world is waiting for: a real advertising vehicle.

The first foray into this area has been their promoted tweets and trends, which were introduced in April and June of this year respectively. With a few months of data behind them and the announcement that these special items will be showing up in third party apps like TweetDeck and HootSuite, things are starting to gain steam for the Twitter revenue express.

AdAge reports

Even after six months, campaigns with nearly 40 different marketers and repeat customers such as Ford, Virgin America and Verizon, Twitter still views its ads as experimental.

Business people on the West Coast are much more connected when it comes to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin use than their counterparts on the other side of the country. NetProspex came to this conclusion when they studied a wide range of contacts for their Fall 2010 Social Business Report.

NetProspex has their own social index (NPSI) which is determined by how contacts rate in the following areas:

Social connectedness: The number of employees with at least one social media profile
Social friendliness and reach: The average number of connections per employee across major social networks
Social activity: The average number of tweets, number of followers, and number of users following

So, about a month ago I started creating some content for a side project of mine. The plan was to do a very in-depth study on the major players in a niche industry and see how they are doing on the internet. The goal was to study each corporation’s branding, their SEO efforts, and traffic to their web properties. I took about four weeks to do case studies on each corporation.

After I collected my data I wrote up an analysis on each in each area. I then made corresponding charts that showed my findings in a clear and easy to understand format. After it was all finished I put it all together and sat back to marvel at my work! I thought, this piece of content is sure to go viral.

A few posts ago, I wrote a piece about how Facebook ads are more effective when they contain a picture. Facebook is taking this idea to heart with a newly released browser page that emphasizes photos over text for fan pages.

The browser is divided into categories such as Movies, TV, Sports, Politicians and Brands. When you click on a topic, you’re presented with a page of icons with a line of text underneath. Clicking the picture will set your phasers on “Like”, clicking the link will take you to the fan page for a look around.

The upside here is that photos are much more compelling than a long list of links. Categorizing works as a suggestive sell figuring if you like the TV show Bones, you’ll probably like Castle.