Marketing Pilgrim

It’s Monday and the biggest news is that apparently Facebook is putting together its own phone. Facebook is denying it, it’s ‘definitely’ using Android and it looks like a blue iPhone (funny picture). All of that is to say that there is nothing going on.

What did happen though is that Flickr has hit a milestone with photo number 5 billion posted to the site over the weekend! Woo-hoo! Although Flickr is far from the Internet photo posting king (that title belongs to, you guessed it, Facebook) it is still very much alive and one of the few Yahoo holdings that actually knows what it does.

Here is the picture that hit the milestone which is Aaron Yeo’s artistic interpretation of the view of the Woodward’s Building in Vancouver.

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Thursday night I attended my first #SEOchat.

For those of you that aren’t aware. SEOchat is a Twitter style chat session that takes place every Thursday night on Twitter. The topic of Thursday’s chat was link building, but every week the organizers focus the discussion around something SEO related. Next week’s chat will feature Marketing Pilgrim’s fearless leader, Andy Beal, so don’t miss things next week!

As I was participating with the group the other night I couldn’t help myself feeling excited talking “links” with other like minded geeks. And then it hit me like a load of bricks. I love SEO. Seriously, I have a mad crush on SEO and it doesn’t look like it’s letting up anytime soon! The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my love for SEO has been a long time in the making. In fact, I think I started falling for SEO long before I even knew what SEO was. You see my love for SEO isn’t rooted in dominating search engine results but rather everything that takes place to do so.

I’ve gotten used to seeing Kim Kardashian get sloppy with a Carl’s Jr. burger on TV but the idea of Heidi Montag hawking a dogfood delivery service on Facebook perplexes me just a little.

In-Stream ad network Ad.ly has just announced a program where you can get celebrities to update their Facebook with glowing reviews of your product. It’s a service they’ve been providing on Twitter and MySpace for some time but Facebook feels like a much bigger step. With it, a client will now be able to generate a celebrity endorsed campaign on all three social networks — kind of like the Triple Crown of online advertising.

A lot of the talk around mobile / local occurs around Google. That makes sense since the search world is still dominated by the Goog. With bing getting some traction in search as of late there should be some more attention paid to the efforts to beef up their maps offerings.

Mobile users have unique information needs. They ask for information at the time they are at some place other than their desk or laptop. This shift is driving innovation in the area of maps that could become an important differentiator between search services of the future as the world starts to head in a truly mobile direction.

Bing has rolled out its version of transit directions in their maps by hitting the big metro areas first with more to come. The Bing Community blog tells us:

Yesterday, Yahoo once again tried to throw its hat into the Internet’s relevance ring. I give them credit for being scrappy to some degree but there seems to be much more talk than real action coming from the Sunnyvale boys (ooops, let’s not forget Carol Bartz at the helm, my bad) Change is something that needs to be concrete and not conceptual so I was wondering if this new plan for the future may be too little too late?

VentureBeat reports

Yahoo executives spoke to journalists at the company’s Sunnyvale, Calif. headquarters this morning about their future plans — both upcoming improvements to products like Yahoo Mail, and an ambitious three-year strategy to revitalize the company.