Marketing Pilgrim

It’s been over a year since we shared the awesome “Is Social Media a Fad?” video. Well, at yesterday’s PubCon keynote panel, they played an updated version of the video.

Enjoy!

Worth noting? This video is now 6 months old, so perhaps we need a third version. Any takers?

For all the talk of social media, the importance of the communication revolution and the industry spouting on ad nauseum about how the social web is changing the way we breath, you would think that SMB’s are getting it.

There are some that absolutely are. They have embraced the web and the options it provides. The trouble is that when we parade these success stories around there is a perception that all SMB’s are on board when nothing could be further from the truth at least according to a recent study. In fact most SMB’s are spending more on getting their website right than anything else. How Year 2000 of them!

It looks like the folks at the Googleplex are channeling their inner Soup Nazi. Yesterday, it was leaked that Googlers across the board were getting a 10% raise and a $1,000 bonus just for being a Googler. Pretty sweet.

The trouble is that in order for the rest of us non-Googlers to get that information someone had to get the digital equivalent of loose lips (Ever hear the phrase “loose lips sink ships”? For a Veteran’s Day note it was coined during World War II to encourage men at sea to not say anything about what they were actually doing in letters home for fear of the enemy getting valuable information and, in turn, sinking a ship). Well, apparently this kind of activity is frowned upon in Mountain View so the folks at All Things Digital followed another leak to reveal that the leaker got the boot.

59% of mobile consumers plan to use their mobile phone for holiday shopping and planning holiday celebrations, not including making phone calls. That’s a huge jump over 2009, when the number was only 25%.

The numbers come from the October 2010 U.S. Mobile Consumer Briefing, which was conducted on behalf of the The Mobile Marketing Association and it’s even further proof that mobile marketing is on the rise.

Of those who expected to use their phone to faciliate shopping, 64% said they’re check their phone before going to a store, but only 12% said it would be in response to a  TV, billboard or newspaper ad. What are they using the phones for? To search for locations where a gift is sold and to compare prices were the two most common responses.

Google is now more instant than ever before thanks to a new feature called Instant Previews. Now, when you skim a list of Google search results you have the option of turning on a preview of the webpage. To do this, you simply click the magnifying glass beside any result. Once it’s toggled on, all of the previews will appear as you skim down the page.

In addition to showing a snapshot of the website, it sometimes pulls out a quote from the page. I thought it was only doing this with blogs, but I can’t find a pattern to which sites have highlighted text and which don’t.

Back in 1992, George Bush Sr. was considered unbeatable in the US presidential race due to major successes in foreign policy developments, such as the ending of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War.  However, recession was hitting hard so James Carville, then Bill Clinton’s senior campaign manager, got the team to rally around the team the slogan “It’s the economy stupid!”  In doing so, they focused on what was most important in the minds of the voting public – the economy.  The strategy paid off.  Clinton went on the win the presidency and Monica Lewinsky became a household name!  But I digress…