Marketing Pilgrim

In a short period of time, location-based applications have become common place to the point where most of us don’t even think about it when a search engine suggests a store in your neighborhood when all you typed was pizza. Location sharing sites such as Foursquare and Gowalla, however, still make some of us think twice. Some of us being, those who have been known to wear a skirt.

According to a study reported on by eMarketer, 77% of women said that when it came to using location-based services, they were concerned about stalking. Surprisingly 60% of the men shared their fear but it didn’t stop them being the most active location-based service users.

As you can see from the chart, 70% of the men 18-34 use a location-based service compared to 64% of the women.

Facebook is making a big push over the next few weeks to get all fan pages over to their new layout. You can choose to do it now or wait for it to be forced upon you in March, but don’t wait. This upgrade is huge for marketers. Here’s why.

Many businesses have Facebook Fan Pages which is great if you have lots of followers coming to you. But when you went outside of your page and left comments on others, those comments linked up to your profile not your page. Until now.

The new page update has a very powerful toggle in the right sidebar that allows you to surf Facebook as your personal profile or as your page.  That means that, like blog commenting, you can now leave comments all over Facebook that lead back to your business (page) instead of back to you.

The mobile space has taken on a slightly different look today as the result of the announcement that Nokia and Microsoft are going to work together in the mobile space.

The talk had been that Nokia was speaking with Microsoft and Google about strategies that could halt the free fall that Nokia was seeing happen to their market share and the reputation of the mobile phone market leader. Many thought that Nokia would be smart to play both sides of the fence and strike deals to produce smart phones for both operating systems. Apparently, they decided that the Microsoft side of the fence was just fine. Now the analysis of this decision begins.

Groupon is trying to close the book on a very interesting week if you are into reputation management.

To summarize:

• Groupon runs ads on Super Bowl that appear to make light of certain social causes
• There is a public “outcry” regarding the ads
• Battle lines are drawn but most people think the ads are a mistake at best and an incredibly stupid move at worst
• Groupon gets more free press than anyone if you don’t mind your brand being associated with the words insensitive, arrogant, pompous etc etc (along with an occasional ‘brilliant’ to be fair)
• Top ad agency Crispin Porter takes shots as well for creating the ads

Oops, I did it again, and again and again. Me and forty-seven percent of mobile application users who responded to a recent Harris Interactive survey click on mobile ads more often by mistake than we do on purpose.

That’s a lot of wasted coin-for-click and as Mobile Marketer points out in their review of the situation, it’s got to stop.

With the high incidence of accidental clicks, advertisers cannot continue to use traditional online ad units and measurement models – namely banners and click-through rates – as a way to deploy and measure the success of mobile campaigns.

We all know that each medium demands its own specialized form of advertising, and with it, system of measurement, but we continue to treat mobile as if it were just a tiny version of the internet. It’s not. People do things on their phones that they don’t do online and vice versa.

“With the launch of Personalized Search, you can use that search history you’ve been building to get better results. You probably won’t notice much difference at first, but as your search history grows, your personalized results will gradually improve.”

Oh wait, that’s from Google’s blog back in 2005. Let me try again.

“We’re introducing a feature that helps Bing present the most relevant website based on an individual’s previous searches.”

Oh, okay. Bing is using “previous searches” which obviously isn’t the same as the a fore mentioned “search history” that Google uses. Did we mention that Bing is also included localized search results, now so you don’t have to type in your city when you’re craving pizza? One problem. When I type in pizza, Bing wants to send me to a town twenty minutes from here and Google wants to send me up the street. Looks like Bing still has some refining to do.