Marketing Pilgrim

Before I get into this post about the latest LinkedIn update I want to make it perfectly clear that I do not use LinkedIn to its utmost. Of the three ‘majors’ (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) the social networking choice of professionals finishes a distant third in order of importance to me personally. I am not saying that this is the way to go I am just telling you this is how I approach things.

That said, the announcement of LinkedIn’s new Company Pages (which replaces the Company Profiles of the past) has me a little confused. Here is what LinkedIn has to say about this in a press release entitled “LinkedIn Launches Powerful New Tool to Help Businesses Drive Growth Using Professional Recommendations”

The latest eMarketer graphic shows that 85% of mobile phone users have never used a mobile coupon. That’s not where we thought we’d be by now. With the wide spread of Smartphones and the rise in mobile marketing, cell phone coupons should be a given but something has stalled the concept at the gate.

Even Cellfire, who’s main purpose was to promote the use of mobile coupons now leans heavily on their club card coupon technology with no sign of a cell phone on their front page.

So what happened?

One problem is the technology. As smart as we, and our phones, are, downloading mobile coupons isn’t as seamless as it should be. My one attempt at using a mobile coupon was for a discount at my local car care center. The coupon showed up on my phone a week after the work was done.

Usually in Germany things along a roadside are blurry because of driving at excessive speeds in the German engineered rocket car of your choice. Well, now courtesy of Google you can stroll virtually along streets in at least one German city, Oberstaufen, and experience that same blurring of the sites but for a very different reason.

The picture below is part of the Street View offering being rolled out by Google in Deutschland.

As you may or may not know, the road to this point in Street View’s German presence has been a rough one for the search giant. As Search Engine Land’s Matt McGee points out

AOL has joined the ranks of many aging divas – she got herself a facelift in hopes of looking young and stylish.

The new design which launched today, still has way more content than one person needs on the front page, but it’s cleaner than ever before. They’ve done away with the heavy color header bars and they’ve pushed down the menu on the left so the first thing you see is content.

They’ve also done a better job of integrating local news and social media feeds. In the “Classic” design, (seen here on the left) they looked like embedded widgets, but now they’re a part of the page. Sort of. The social media feeds come in via AOL’s Lifestream page which they hope you’ll use instead of HootSuite or TweetDeck to monitor your accounts.

Look what I found on HootSuite this morning.

It’s funny because I went there to get some information about the new Promoted Tweets program and lo and behold — I got one.

As of this morning, Twitter has begun inserting Promoted Tweets into the timeline of HootSuite users only. When I visit my Twitter home page directly, the ad is nowhere to be seen.

According to the Twitter Blog, the ads are targeted, only appearing in the timelines they deem relevant based on who you follow and what you talk about. Since I talk about movies and TV a lot, and I follow several studios, this particular Tweet makes sense and I don’t mind it. But I don’t think everyone is going to be as tolerant as I am about these ads. Depending on the frequency and how closely you follow your account, these could become annoying and fast.

There’s a new search engine kid on the block: blekko

blekko is different because it uses what it calls “slashtags” to help the searcher refine their search results.

There are two major problems that will prevent blekko from reaching mainstream success. I’ll reveal both, after this video intro to blekko:

OK, so the two big problems? You just watched one of them. Any search engine that requires a video tutorial is not destined for mainstream success. When was the last time you had to explain how to conduct a search on Google? If I had to explain slashtags to my mom, sister, or just about anyone, I’d likely get a ton of questions and they’d ultimately end up going back to Google. Google became popular because it was easy to use and did all the heavy lifting for you.