Marketing Pilgrim

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.

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

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.

Yesterday, I discussed how hype and news maybe shouldn’t be held up as equals. Some of you disagreed which is cool but what happened today goes to show the risks of talking a good game without having anything to back it up.

Yesterday, Mozilla discussed their ad tracking blocker for their browser but couldn’t give an indication of when it would be actually ready. Well, Mozilla’s frienemy, Google, has their own extension for their Chrome browser with the difference being it can be used right now.

The LA Times Technology blog reports.

Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox Web browsers are each gaining new features that will block advertisers from tracking Web surfing habits.

The B to B world online is a different marketing animal in many ways. While B to C marketers get all of the attention with their online promotions through Facebook, Twitter etc the B to B crowd slogs through the online world at a pace that maddens some. In other words, they move a bit slower than their B to C brethren.

B to B Magazine (which I recommend you check out on a regular basis) recently did a survey that echoes the “b to b is a little less sexy online” with the results on where increase in spend would occur in 2011. Essentially it’s all about the basics and, quite honestly, I suspect that many of the B to C hares could take a hint from the B to B tortoises. eMarketer shared the following

If you routinely scan social media for complaints about your business or product, come March you’ll need to add another site to the list. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is now beta testing a new website that will allow consumers to list their complaints publicly. The site is called SaferProducts.gov and AdAge calls it “Yelp with the imprimatur of government authority.”

The site will focus only on product safety issues and complaints will be screened before they go live, but don’t expect too many of the posts to get tossed. The CPSC says, all comments “that meet the minimum requirements for publication in the Database will be disclosed in the Database.” The legalese that follows is pretty extensive but it all boils down to what the screener considers to be reasonable. Which means, unless a consumer sends in a blatantly outrageous claim, it’s likely to get published.