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Mobile Trends 2011 for the Realist

posted on January 26, 2011

You know how we approach research here at Marketing Pilgrim. We look at the title of the report or survey, then we look at the source, then we see the (more often than not) obvious connection to why this ‘research’ was done. The answer is usually PR versus actually showing or proving anything.

These reports often leaves one scratching their head but on occasion there is something that comes across our desk that refreshing because it is, gulp, realistic.

Objectivity in research is defined for me by the use of words that don’t always make every subject sound like an online Utopia where everything is always positive and things are always on the rise. That’s not the real world. Research that states for a particular vertical that everything is ‘unicorns and rainbows’ is marginalized because nothing in this world is all upside. However, you would never guess that from most of the research in the marketplace these days.

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Twitter’s Promoted Tweets Roll Out; A Make or Break for the Social Network?

posted on January 26, 2011

Well, they’ve been a long time coming, but Twitter ads are finally ready to go mainstream…almost!

MediaPost reports that the self-service version of Twitter’s promoted tweets are being rolled out to advertisers–albeit a select few. So far, Clix Marketing’s David Szetela is the only one talking about it and he’s landed Guy Kawasaki as a Twitter ads client.

As part of the roll out, we’re starting to learn a few more details of how they work…

…Twitter’s self-serve platform requires the advertiser to enter a name, and date and time to run the campaign. It also asks for “interests” and “search keywords,” as well as a maximum bid and daily budget…the backend technology crawls tweets and user bios looking for the frequency of repeated words. The platform determines where to insert tweets in the user’s timeline, but it’s not clear if the algorithm takes into account Twitter followers. Nor is it understood how Twitter will rank the Promoted Tweets in Twitter streams.

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LinkedIn Ads Now Out of Beta and More Targeted

posted on January 26, 2011

LinkedIn has finally taken the beta tag off of their self-serve ad platform. The beta tag has been in place since 2008. So rather than looking like Google in keeping a beta tag on an offering until it rusted the time has come for LinkedIn Ads to be ‘official’. Of course, the talk of a first quarter IPO can help a company to ‘clean up shop’ a bit as well but who’s counting.

As reported by MediaPost

LinkedIn Wednesday formally launched its pay-per-click, self-serve ad system after being in beta since 2008. Rebranded as LinkedIn Ads, the text-advertising service formerly known as DirectAds mainly expands audience targeting options to include job title, LinkedIn groups and companies. Previously, the platform offered several targeting choices such as age, gender, geography, job function and seniority.

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Latinos and Teens: Cracking the Social Media Codes

posted on January 25, 2011

If I say “Pudding!” to my closest friends, they’ll crack up laughing because they know exactly what I mean. It’s an in-joke, a kind of secret language that defines us as a group. Widen that circle to my fandom friends and we truly have a language all our own. A language we use so commonly that we often forget that outsiders can’t figure out what we’re talking about. Then again, maybe that’s part of why we developed the language in the first place, so we can talk in front of the whole world but only those clued-in will know the truth.

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What Do Men Want? Unicast Has the Answer

posted on January 25, 2011

What do men want? It’s a question I ask myself every day and today Unicast came up with the answer! Men don’t want to have fun, they want to know what’s going on in the world. Really? That wouldn’t have been my first guess.

According to What Men Want 2011, 67% of men said they use the internet “primarily for news,” 65% said they use it to connect with family and only 51% said for entertainment. The exception to the rule was in the 18-25 age group, where game play and and watching TV or movies online was the primary focus. In all other age groups, those activities never ranked higher than 63% and dropped as low as 25% in the over 65 group.

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Seven Superstar CEOs Too Dumb to Work for Google

posted on January 25, 2011

It looks like Google is hiring again.

The search giant says 2011 will be its “biggest hiring year in company history” which means it will likely hire more than the 6,000 it added in 2007.

Still, we all know how hard it is to get a job at Google. If you don’t have a PhD, then you may as well look into janitorial positions at the company. Don’t have any kind of degree? Yeah, good luck with that. You won’t get in, but you know what? None of these CEOs would ever qualify for a job at Google either–so you’re in great company. ;-)

1. Bill Gates

Chairman (& former CEO), Microsoft

Education: A Harvard dropout

2. Steve Jobs

CEO, Apple

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Will You “Like” Facebook’s New Ad Format?

posted on January 25, 2011

If you’re not a fan of Twitter’s new sponsored tweets ads, then you’re going to be somewhat grumpy by the time you get through reading this post.

You see, Facebook’s decided that it too would like to turn status updates into sponsored ads and is launching something similar. According to AdAge, advertisers will be able to convert a “like” or check-in–and some other kinds of brand interaction–into a Facebook ad.

How does that work? Here’s an example…

…if Starbucks buys a “sponsored story” ad, the status of a user’s friends who check into or “like” Starbucks will run twice: once in the user’s news feed, and again as a paid ad for Starbucks. Though clearly marked with the words “sponsored story,” the ad — which will includes a user’s name, just like the news feed — is not optional for Facebook users.